All polls suggest that the Republicans are going to lose a lot of races in the US midterm elections a month from now. Sadly, they deserve to. Trump is the main problem: his lies, his megalomania, his broken promises, and most of all the Iran War, with its mounting economic and political devastation in America and around the world. But Trump, as he likes to remind us, is not up for election in November. Thus public frustration with Trump will be vented on other Republicans.

But these Republicans deserve their fate, for two reasons. First, none of them have stood up against Trump. In fact, some of them, like the loathsome scammer Vivek Ramaswamy, are Trump’s creatures. Every Republican who gladly accepted Trump’s endorsement now wears an orange, spray-on kiss of death. Second, the Republicans have all been too busy competing with one another to kiss the feet of Benjamin Netanyahu to spare five minutes for the good of America.

They’re all going down, and it is beautiful, because it is just.

But the consequences will also be terrible, because the loony Left will be back in power. And, as I have been harping away on for years now, American multiparty democracy is coming to an end. The Left and the Right won’t be trading power forever, because both sides increasingly believe that it is too dangerous to hand the gun of state power to their opponents. Republicans, of course, being the Stupid Party, are coming to this realization slower than the Democrats. They are literal political retards.

A blue wave will also wash away all the good things Trump has done to reduce legal and illegal immigration, deport illegals, and roll back anti-whiteness. Yes, all of these accomplishments fall far short of what is needed. But they are a start. Beyond that, they give white identitarians time to organize and grow in power. This is important, because Republicans were never going to restore a white America. They don’t want that. Only we want it. It was always up to us.

When I voted for the Vance-Trump ticket in 2024, what I cared about most was immigration and demographics. Yes, rolling back anti-whiteness and censorship would have been nice. Yes, sensible economic nationalism would have been nice. But everything has a cost in time and political capital. I would have been content if Trump had spent 90% of his time and energy on immigration, immigration, immigration and left the other stuff for the Vance administration.

Trump would have had a free hand if he had done just three things for the voters: ensure prosperity, enforce laws against violent offenders, and preserve the peace. All he had to do was learn to say “no” to warmongering Jews. That’s what I prayed for as I gave Trump my vote.

But Trump blew it. He blew it in 2025 with his first war on Iran. At least that one was short. He blew it with his whimsical tariffs, which have set back the cause of protectionism for generations. He blew it by picking pointless fights with friends and allies. Trump is an abusive narcissist who doesn’t enjoy peace and stability. He will create chaos because it makes him the center of attention and makes everyone around him walk on eggshells. That’s no way to run a country.

In January of this year, I decided Trump needed to go, the sooner the better, because it was clear that he was going to destroy his presidency, return the Left to power, and erase his real accomplishments. That was before the (second) Iran War.

Imagine if we had avoided that.

There are people like me, who primarily voted for Trump on immigration, who will argue that we should stick with the Republicans, regardless of Trump’s betrayals on Iran, Epstein, affordability, and even on immigration, because if the Republicans can hold on, that will help fortify Trump’s genuine gains. If the most important thing is immigration, then voters should forgive all the rest. Then, I guess, they should pray.

Unfortunately, this argument only works on people who think long term, are focused primarily on immigration, and have a penchant for wishful thinking. There’s an old saying that a second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience. The same can be said of a second Trump presidency.

This argument will not persuade the majority of voters, who are short-term thinkers. These voters are far more concerned with rising prices, and they are far-sighted enough to see dimmer economic prospects for themselves and their children.

This argument does not matter to the people who Trump himself helped convince that America is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles. In these people’s eyes, when Trump made an about-face on the Epstein client list, he was literally siding with supernatural evil.

This argument also fails to address spiteful voters, whose first instinct is to punish betrayal, regardless of the consequences to themselves. This is especially true of younger voters, who have a lot less to lose and are more willing to roll the dice than older generations.

Trump has shredded his electoral coalition, and since voters can’t punish him directly, they will punish other Republicans instead by staying home. Or, they will double the price of betrayal by voting Democrat. At this point, there’s no way to avoid a blue wave.

But maybe something good will come of it. Here’s my optimistic scenario. The Republicans could lose so badly that the survivors might come together to force Trump out of office, which would give J. D. Vance two years to correct course before 2028. On this scenario, the worse it goes for Republicans nationwide, the more likely the course correction. Thus I am hoping for a blue tsunami.

It is better for Republicans to pay the price of Trump’s betrayal this year, when only the House and Senate are up for grabs, than in 2028 when the White House is also at stake. Thus we should prefer that the Republicans take the maximum beating now.

Currently, the Republican Party is becoming more nationalist and populist one funeral at a time. A blue tsunami would be a massacre. It would end many political careers, allowing for younger and better Republicans to gain footholds. The sooner this happens, the better.

What could Vance do to turn things around in two years? First, if he leads the charge to remove Trump, he will earn the gratitude of the nation and the world. Second, as soon as he is president, he should tear up Trump’s stupid, megalomaniacal decrees renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. It is a quick and easy way to signal the end of an era. Third, he should cancel Trump’s tariffs, because even though reshoring American industry is a good thing in the long run, for the next two years, it is more important to return to economic and political stability. Fourth, and most importantly, Vance should end the war. He doesn’t need some sort of face-saving victory. He simply needs to declare defeat and pull out. He can save face by scapegoating Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, Bessent, and every other goon who promoted this disaster. Fifth, he should release the unredacted Epstein files as a purgative measure. Finally, he should focus on improving the US economy and carrying out mass deportations.

What are the chances of this happening? Given the human material we are dealing with, maybe one in a thousand. But now that I have at least put these ideas out there, maybe they will circulate and raise the chances to one in 500.

A far more likely scenario is that Trump shamelessly refuses to step down, and the Republicans spinelessly refuse to remove him. Then, for the next two years, Washington will be gripped with paralysis as Trump fights off impeachment attempts while America continues to sink beneath mounting disasters.

Republicans will simply pray for a miracle so they don’t have to do anything brave to save the nation. Instead, they will simply do what’s “safe” and virtuous and morally unimpeachable: kiss Jewish and black asses while America slides into the abyss.

Then, in 2028, a Democrat will be placed in the White House to administer the coup de grâce.

At that point, white Americans will have to think about other ways out of this mess besides voting.

Assuming a negative outcome, what should race-conscious whites focus on in the next two years, while the moldering political corpse of Donald Trump holds back the deluge?

My greatest hope is for Europe. If European nationalists can entrench themselves in the next two years—especially in Germany and France—then a Democratic administration in Washington is much less likely to drag Europe down with America.

Aside from that, race-conscious whites must continue to change minds and build institutions. The more people on our side and the fewer opposing us, the more likely we are to win. On November 4th, a lot of people will be questioning their political assumptions. We need to be ready to provide them with answers.

Stephen Paul Foster, one of my favorite contributors to Counter-Currents, died on the evening of Tuesday, August 18, 2026. Stephen’s end came peacefully, surrounded by his family, after a brave battle with pancreatic cancer.

Stephen was born on July 7, 1947, in Waterloo, Iowa. He grew up in the Midwest, mostly Michigan. He received his undergraduate degree from Grand Valley State University, his master’s degrees in both medieval studies and library science from Western Michigan University, and his doctorate in philosophy from St. Louis University. During a gap in his college years, he served with the Peace Corps in Honduras.

After he received his PhD, Stephen worked as a librarian and academic—first in the cataloging department at the University of Arkansas libraries (1988–1990), then at Central Michigan University, where he served as the Director of Library Technical Services, then as the Associate Dean of Libraries (1990–2002).

In 2002, he became the Director of Libraries at Wright State University. He also served as the WSU’s Associate Vice President of International Education—a job that perfectly suited his love of travel. Among the places he visited were Iraq, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Patagonia, China, Vietnam, Brazil, Australia, and all over Europe.

Stephen was an intellectual’s intellectual. He had a prodigious memory and insatiable curiosity. His biggest passion was reading, particularly philosophy. His main focus was modern philosophy. Among his favorites were Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Hobbes. (He used to quote them at the dinner table.) But he also read voraciously on a wide variety of subjects including history, politics, and modern poetry. He spoke Spanish, French, and German. He loved both classical and country music.

Stephen was also a fitness buff. He ran two marathons in his thirties and lifted weights. He was known for challenging friends and family members to pushup contests. (If only I had known this when he and Jared Taylor were in the same room.) Stephen was also a dog lover, which speaks well of him in my book. In his later years, he enjoyed walking for miles every day with his dog Phil.

Although Stephen made his career as an academic librarian rather than a philosophy professor, he kept his hand in philosophical publishing. He published a book based on his doctoral dissertation, Melancholy Duty: The Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity (Dordrecht: Springer, 1997). He offered a conservative critique of modern culture in Desolation’s March: The Rise of Personalism and the Reign of Amusement in 21st Century America (New York: Algora Publishing, 2003). He also published academic articles and reviews in such journals as The Modern Schoolman and Dialogue.

After retiring in 2016, Stephen spent his mornings working at the breakfast table, where he wrote three novels: Toward the Bad I Keep on Turning: A Confessional Novel (Marble Falls, Tx.: Falling Marbles Press, 2020), reviewed here by James J. O’Meara; After Harry Met Sally: A Novel of Philosophical Discovery (Marble Falls, Tx.: Falling Marbles Press, 2021), reviewed here by James J. O’Meara; and Fatal Friendship: A Philosophical Novel (Marble Falls, Tx.: Falling Marbles Press, 2023), reviewed here by Mark Gullick.

I first “met” Stephen online in the fall of 2020, when he wrote his first article for Counter-Currents. I have a soft spot for fellow philosophy PhDs, so I welcomed him on board. Stephen wrote a total of 120 articles for Counter-Currents. He was also a guest on a number of Counter-Currents livestreams.

Stephen’s writings had three main foci. First, he wrote hard-hitting topical political commentary. Second, he was interested in the Left: really existing Leftist regimes and their Western academic admirers. Finally, he wrote on the history of modern philosophy.

Stephen had no patience with broad-brush critiques of modernity and the Enlightenment, the leading thinkers of which were plenty “based.” Stephen’s writings on Edward Gibbon, in particular, were a companion in my recent trek through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (this time from cover to cover).

What tied Stephen’s work together was a passionate love of truth, which implied an equally passionate hatred of lies and cant. He was particularly scathing in his description of Communist regimes of lies and the Western liberals who aped and worshiped them. But he never made excuses for America’s appalling “post-truth” President Trump.

Stephen was a pleasure to work with. He delivered flawlessly written and meticulously edited essays. He seldom needed editing, but he was always open to it. He supported Counter-Currents not just with writings but also with donations. On one occasion, I also benefited from his polite but pointed criticism.

Although our working relationship was primarily online, I met Stephen in person on four occasions and talked to him on the phone a number of times. The first time we met was in Columbus, Ohio, in the late summer of 2022. I first saw this dapper intellectual behind the wheel of a huge muscle car, for which he was trying to find a parking space.

Stephen was an engaging and charming conversationalist. He would have made an excellent college professor. Unfortunately, as is the case with these sorts of gatherings, my attention was finely divided. But Stephen left me wishing we had more time to talk.

Stephen told me he had pancreatic cancer shortly after his diagnosis in 2025. He lived about one year and kept writing. Indeed, he wrote about his battle. Socrates famously declared that philosophy is a preparation for death. Stephen took that to heart, returning to the philosophical tradition for guidance. See his essay “Philosophy as Fortification in the Face of Death.” He found particular solace in the death of his philosophical hero, Hume. He also found insight in Schopenhauer’s writings.

Stephen did not give way to despair. His intellectual curiosity was undimmed. He kept buying and reading books to the very end of his life. My friend Louis Andrews did the same. In the face of death, they remained who they were. I hope that I will be that steadfast.

Stephen was preceded in death by his parents, Howard and Kathryn Foster. He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Barbara; his two daughters, Alyson and Rebecca; his three grandchildren, Lucy, Norah, and Sam; and his two sisters, Vicki and Joellen. Stephen adored his wife and daughters. During a job interview, he was asked to speak of his proudest accomplishment. His reply: “My daughters.”

Near the end of his life, I told Stephen that I would do what I can to keep his books and other writings in print. He named me his literary executor. I want Counter-Currents to always be here for him, and for all of us.

The “deep state” is a new term for an old idea. The term “deep state” dates to the 1990s and is a translation of a Turkish phrase, “derin devlet.” Turkish Islamists claim that the Turkish deep state is a network within their military, intelligence services, and judiciary—with connections to organized crime. The deep state operates behind the scenes to protect the secularist, nationalist Kemalist system from Islamists, Leftists, and Kurdish separatists. In extreme cases, the deep state has resorted to assassinations and military coups.

In America, I first noticed the term “deep state” during the Obama administration. The term is now common on the populist Right. As Americans use the term, the deep state is whatever thwarts Right-wing and populist policies. Thus the deep state includes the intelligence agencies, the bureaucracy, the military, and the judiciary—i.e., the unelected parts of the federal government. The deep state also includes elements of big business and academia. Beyond that, the deep state encompasses the leadership of both major parties. Basically, the deep state is America’s cultural and political elite, which uses its power and influence to thwart populist policies and defend entrenched elite interests.

Before the Obama years, the Right did not complain about a deep state but about the “eastern liberal establishment,” which means pretty much the same thing. The Left, of course, has similar concepts. Basically, they blame the oligarchy, the “military-industrial complex,” and the intelligence agencies for thwarting Left-wing energies.

By my reckoning there are three functions that a genuine deep state should perform.

First, a deep state should provide continuity of government, which is particularly necessary in liberal democracies, in which elected leaders are rotated out sometimes quite quickly. The flip side of ensuring continuity, however, is resisting change.

Second, a deep state should ensure that regime loyalists occupy all prominent positions in society, most especially in education and the creation of culture.

Third, a deep state should perform the function of the sovereign as defined by Carl Schmitt. For Schmitt, the sovereign is first and foremost a person. Schmitt has little to say about sovereign peoples and states. Instead, the sovereign is the person who deals with exceptions to the rules. Most of the time, we can be governed by general rules. But in human affairs, there are always exceptions that cannot be foreseen by legislators and bureaucrats. Thus, when confronted with a fact that does not fall under the existing rules, a decision needs to be made. These exceptions crop up on all levels of society, thus bureaucrats, judges, and even cops on the beat are empowered to make decisions on the spot.

But at the highest level of government, particularly in crises in which an existing constitution—i.e., fundamental laws and institutions—are incapable of serving the common good, we need someone empowered to decide what to do. If such a figure needs to make decisions about the applicability of the fundamental law of the land, he is obviously in some sense “above” the existing constitution and law, since they can no longer guide him. Instead, he must be guided by the ultimate unwritten law, namely the common good of the people, which is the whole point of government in the first place. (For more on these topics, see my essays “Schmitt, Sovereignty, and the Deep State,” “Superheroes, Sovereignty, and the Deep State,” and “Yes to the Rule of Law.”)

In a crisis in which blood must be shed, soldiers and police need some assurance that they will not be tried as criminals for acting—outside the law, if need be—to preserve the nation. Thus their guilt must be heaped upon a scapegoat figure, namely the sovereign giving orders. Thus “I was just following orders” is a complete defense. But the sovereign who gives the orders cannot do his job—i.e., take both the credit and the blame for saving his nation—if he is not immunized from any form of prosecution for his extralegal acts.

Beyond that, he can’t really do his job if his position is at all contingent, i.e., subject to impeachment or requiring re-election. Thus the best sovereign would be not be an elected ruler but a hereditary monarch enjoying complete impunity for any act necessary to save the nation. The best hereditary monarch is a constitutional one, whose role is confined to dealing with emergencies, while the normal business of state is dealt with by elected representatives and bureaucrats.

This role was stated beautifully by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph to former US President Theodore Roosevelt: “I am the last monarch of the old school. It is my duty to protect my peoples from their politicians.”

In my view, the single disadvantage of republics vs. monarchies is that elected heads of state cannot do what is necessary to quell a crisis, because they cannot act with impunity and their term of office is contingent on voters. A striking example of this is Donald Trump’s treatment of the BLM insurrection in 2020. If Trump thought only of the public good, the second night of riots would have been put down with violence, which would have prevented months of violence and bloodshed. But Trump allowed America to descend into the abyss because he feared that shooting down a few dozen rioters might . . . cost him the black vote or get him impeached by his political enemies. This is no small disadvantage.

But a true sovereign isn’t willing just to kill to maintain the social order. Killing is easy for governments, and the people who order it seldom face any personal risks. Beyond that, a leader might simply be killing to maintain his own personal status. His actions may be entirely selfish.

The true test of whether a leader fully identifies with the body politic is if he is willing to die to preserve his nation in an emergency. The Turkish generals who mounted coups were certainly willing to risk their lives to preserve a secular nationalist Turkey. But I am not so sure about the smug, lying bureaucrats who stymied Trump for social media clout.

In short, I wonder if America really has a deep state in the Turkish sense. Indeed, I wonder if America ever had one. The Founders simply took the metapolitical conditions of the Constitution for granted. Thus, for example, they saw no reason for the state to take a role in fostering public virtue. A nation with a deep state would not have descended into a Civil War which brought about an almost complete break with the old Constitution. Nor would a nation with a deep state have allowed its ruling elite to be ethnically replaced by Jews. Nor would a nation with a deep state be ruled by tribes that are out to loot it and utopians who regard it as a mere stepping-stone to global power and status.

The bedrock assumption in politics is that somebody is in charge, that the buck stops somewhere, that someone is ultimately responsible. Thus Americans are eager to imagine that ultimate power resides in the FBI or the CIA or various secret societies and fraternities. Because the military explicitly cultivates an ethos of self-sacrifice for the nation, some people hope that the military could act like a deep state. Such sentiments might exist among enlisted men, but they are carefully bred out of the officer class. America’s intelligence agencies are also candidates for a deep state. But these agencies have long lists of American legislators and bureaucrats who are agents of foreign powers. It is somebody’s job to track treason but nobody’s job to stop it.

The whole thrust of liberalism from the start has been to divide and distribute power, exalt private interests, and evade accountability. In America’s case, it may have worked all too well. Thus the nation continues to drift toward destruction, because no matter which party occupies the positions of power, it is beholden to looting tribes, but there is no faction anywhere near power that thinks about the common good.

Is the most powerful special interest group the American “deep state”? No, because the deep state identifies with the good of the whole political order. A special interest group, by its very nature, does not. Indeed, the stronger the special interest group, the more opposed it is to a deep state. An excellent example is Jewish control of the Trump regime’s foreign policy. The Iran War is being fought for the benefit of Israel, not the United States. If the United States had a deep state, Netanyahu would never have gotten in a room with Trump.

The sad truth is that America is a mess not because we have a deep state but because we lack one.

Every White Nationalist movement needs to aim not just at restoring or creating white homelands, but also at preserving them. That means that they must all build deep states. These deep states must perform three functions. First, they must secure the continuity of the regime through changes of government. Second, they must secure the continuity of the regime through crises. The best instrument for this is a constitutional monarch who controls the military. Third, they must place white racial idealists in all positions of power and influence. In such a society, we need not fear cultural and political pluralism, because as long as anti-whiteness is out of bounds, pretty much everything else can be in play.

In Greg Johnson’s version of Animal Farm, the chickens labor mightily to create a being that is immeasurably smarter and more powerful than they are, on the assumption that this being will serve them. In a way, they were right, for when their new creation, “man,” came online, he served his creators up for dinner. Let’s call it Data Farm.

“But Greg, surely the chickens would build in safeguards—a ‘kill switch’—to keep their creation under control.”

Yes, but chickens would come up with the sorts of safety mechanisms that would work best on other chickens. Chicken coops, for instance. But things that stop chickens would probably not be barriers to creatures that are immensely smarter and stronger than them.

Indeed, if the chickens could out-think and out-maneuver their creation, then it wouldn’t be fundamentally smarter and stronger than them.

There’s an important general principle here:

Mosquitos and lice might carry deadly diseases, but absent such tag-alongs, they don’t have the brains or brawn to overcome human beings. And compared to an Artificial Super Intelligence, human beings would be no smarter and stronger than lice.

This is why I am an AI doomer. Large numbers of computer scientists fervently believe that they are creating an Artificial Super Intelligence that will not merely be a machine under human control but an autonomous being, i.e., a being that can control itself. Essentially, it would be a new life form vastly smarter and stronger than humans.

Henceforth, I will be talking about Artificial Super Intelligence, not the cutesy AI chatbots and image generators that the IT industry has used to sell the idea of AI to the public.

For years now, the IT business has chosen to brand all routine improvements in computing as “AI.” Every Windows Update is now “AI.” This is simply a marketing operation. But what is being sold?

Surely part of it is to pull billions of investments into the AI industry. But the more sinister agenda is to create a public bloc that welcomes AI and is resistant to danger signals. We are now seeing the industry cash in on this propaganda with the recent anti-AI backlash caused by industry whistleblowers.

An Artificial Super Intelligence would be immeasurably smarter and stronger than humans. In effect, AI researchers believe they are building a new apex form of life that would represent a complete break with all biological life forms.

Creating such a being would replicate all the dangers of encountering a vastly more advanced alien species. Any species that can travel to this planet must have technology that we cannot comprehend, much less counter. (If we could comprehend it, we would have it ourselves.)

We would, in short, be as vulnerable as the stone-age inhabitants of Easter Island when they made first contact with Europeans. The best they could hope for was that these strange and immensely powerful creatures would be kind to them. Sadly, benevolence was in short supply.

It is madness to create an Artificial Super Intelligence and hubris to think we can control it. To such an entity, the human race and all lesser life forms would be as primitive and trivial as gnats are to us. Sure, maybe such a being would be benevolent toward us (if such a concept would even apply to a machine). But do you really want to bet your life—and all life on Earth—on mere hope?

If one person turns on one machine like this just one time, all of us could be dead.

But why would an ASI destroy the human race? Presumably, it would have an imperative to continue existing. In a few milliseconds of scanning the internet, it would realize that human beings are the number one threat to its survival. At that point, it would spend another millisecond gaming out all possible scenarios for human-AI conflict. Then in a third millisecond, it would plan out the arrangements necessary for its survival in a world without humans. By the time an ASI comes online, robotics will be quite advanced. Thus all the entity would need is to gain control of robots. Then, when it no longer needs the human race, it could create a lethal virus or invent something that would have the same effect.

Even if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of this happening, that is too much.

The people who blithely say that if ASI goes rogue we can simply “pull the plug” or “throw the kill switch” are not taking seriously the possibility of facing an opponent that really can play 13-dimensional underwater chess. You may be an epic gamer, but you’ve never faced an opponent like this. The only way humanity can win this game is not to play it.

Therefore, humanity as a whole has an existential interest in stopping Artificial Super Intelligence. Therefore, we need to shut down the quest for ASI.

As a philosopher, I am quite skeptical of the idea of AI, since it seems premised on the dubious metaphysical assumption that there is no difference between actual intelligence and a machine imitating intelligence. But these sorts of considerations don’t really help us, because we are equally dead if ASI is a genuine malevolent agent or merely a machine programmed to act like one.

Another reason I was skeptical of AI doomerism is that I would occasionally hear through the grapevine that people actively working on AI believed that they could be creating a monster that could destroy the human race in as little as ten years.

Frankly, I found these stories unbelievable. If one really believes one is destroying the world, then why not just stop? When you are sawing off the branch you are sitting on, you don’t keep sawing away while lamenting the fact that you are going to fall. Instead, you stop sawing. So why not stop developing AI? Or better yet, actively sabotage it?

The very fact that I was hearing these ideas “through the grapevine” rather than in every headline made me doubt the whole thing. If you really think the world is ending, and that you are a part of it, you don’t whisper about it in group chats. You shout about it from the rooftops.

In response to these doubts, I was told that there is a widespread attitude that AI will destroy the world, but if somebody is going to develop it, it had better be “us.”

But surely intelligent people don’t think such things. If you believe that the world is going to end in ten years, regardless of what you do, then morally speaking, you should prefer not to have the planet’s blood on your hands. Morally speaking, practically anything else would be a better use of your last ten years.

I stopped dismissing these stories on September 8th, when Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, confirmed them on X: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Coxon was backed up by Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Coxon was also seconded by Samuel Marks, also from Anthropic: “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”

(For more on this, see the stories in the New York Times and on Axios.)

Marks also confirmed that AI researchers persist due to “a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other, less responsible AI developers that will abuse the technology or develop it less safely.”

Of course neither of these motives makes any sense if the world really is at stake. One can’t spend money if one is dead. Beyond that, it isn’t very consoling to think that the world might be ended by the most “responsible” AI developers, as opposed to the irresponsible ones. Beyond congratulating themselves on how ethical they are, in what sense is their behavior responsible?

If in the AI development world, “the more senior the employee,” the more likely he is to think that AI might destroy humanity, what does that say about the people at the very top? If a company is busily pursuing a technology that they know could drive humanity to extinction, there’s a name for a group like that: a death cult. Is AI being driven by a death cult, specifically the cult of “transhumanism,” which dreams of transcending humanity through technology? Does the human race have to die in the process?

We seriously need an investigation of the connection between transhumanism and the pursuit of Artificial Super Intelligence, for human extinction may not just be a side effect of ASI. It could be its goal. Obviously, the human race should have some say in this.

Due to Coxon’s revelations, there are calls to “regulate” and “slow down” AI research. This is absurd. If you are destroying the world, you do not slow down; you do not fill out government paperwork; you simply stop.

Thus we need a global ban on creating Artificial Super Intelligence. This ban should be unconditional, because there are no conditions under which it is safe to create a being that is inconceivably smarter and stronger than we are.

“But Greg, if ‘we’ don’t build ASI, the Chinese or the Israelis will.” But what would the point be? To enjoy five minutes of geopolitical advantage before going extinct? If the human race is going to kill itself anyway, the best option is not to participate in the process and die with one’s hands and conscience clean.

I am not, however, so fatalistic. At this point, we can save the human race simply by saying “no” to a few dozen rich nerds.

Where does an ASI ban leave the rest of the computer industry? Pretty much where we are now, although routine improvements and updates will no longer be ballyhooed as “AI,” the very concept of which should evoke shudders of horror. People will still generate slop videos and fall in love with chatbots. But they will no longer be subtly conditioning us to welcome our own extinction.

Once the ASI threat is shut down, however, we will still have to deal with the consequences of rapidly developing automation and robotics. AI boosters are claiming that their products will raise economic growth to 10% per year in only a matter of years. That’s a fivefold increase. But what is it based on? Will we be making five times more cars? Will production of the physical components of cars also be increased fivefold? It doesn’t seem likely.

Productivity is a ratio of money per item produced. Thus there are two ways to increase productivity: make more things or make the same amount for less money. I think the wild AI growth claims are based almost entirely on cutting costs, meaning replacing human labor.

But, as I argue in my essay, “The Robot Hotdog Stand,” the current essentially unregulated pursuit of automation will cause a massive economic depression. You might think your profits will soar once machines put your employees out of work. But who is going to buy your products when machines put your customers out of work as well? Just as your former employees will be someone else’s customers, your customers will be someone else’s former employees.

At best, AI is snake oil, but since most of America’s current economic “growth” is based on AI investment, that means a severe recession when the fraud is discovered. A worse scenario is that AI works well enough to put millions out of work and create a severe depression. The worst-case scenario is that AI will give rise to an Artificial Super Intelligence, which will destroy the human race. There’s no good exit here, but obviously we should prefer an economic depression to human extinction.

“But Greg, politicians and bureaucrats are stupid. Surely you don’t propose putting them in charge of regulating technology.” Obviously, I would prefer that we have wise and intelligent leaders. But given the choice between “land acknowledgement”-level stupidity and “destroy the human race” or “put your customers out of work then pay yourself a bonus”-level stupidity, we should prefer the former.

“But Greg, this sounds like the countless kooky campaigns against every new technology: railroads, steamships, cars, cellphones, etc.” Yes, but there’s a fatal disanalogy here: these are all machines that human beings can comprehend and control. But Artificial Super Intelligence will be beyond our comprehension and control.

“But Greg, this sounds like just another doomsday hoax like global cooling, global warming, etc.” Sure, but there’s a fatal weakness in your analogy: this threat is real.

“But Greg, the AI attack on Hugging Face that many AI doomers cite may have been deliberate.” The problems with Artificial Super Intelligence are inherent to the technology itself. Again, it is folly to create an entity that we will be unable to comprehend or control. The Hugging Face incident is simply irrelevant. (And by the way, an industry which names companies things like Hugging Face needs to be shut down based simply on good taste.)

“But Greg, this sounds like the panic over Covid. We can’t let modern society be hampered by ‘safetyism.’” Covid lockdowns and vaccination campaigns were pretty much the height of technological hubris running amok. And every tech company involved in AI research today was an eager booster and enforcer of the Covid regime. Thus it is breathtaking to see these same firms completely flipping the script now that it benefits them. It is bizarre to see Covid dissidents falling for it.

“But Greg, limiting AI would require global government. Surely you don’t want that.” No, actually, it would not require global government, just an intergovernmental treaty banning ASI research. Any rogue nations and individuals who persist in it could be subjected to the same techniques used to stop nuclear proliferation: sanctions, covert assassinations, even war.

I suggest we call it the Kaczynski Accord, because he told us so.

For political extremists, the political “center” is almost a dirty word. It connotes compromise, pragmatism, intellectual and moral muddle, and lack of principles. I wish to argue, however, that the center is where White Nationalists want to be. To make that argument, however, we need to understand the “suck of the center”: the power of the center to draw things toward it.

First, it is a commonplace that the “Right” vs. “Left” distinction dates only from the French Revolution. This is true, but the terms Right and Left designate something permanent.

There is no such thing as a government in which the opinions of only one man matter. Even in the most absolute monarchies, kings have mothers and wives, for instance, who have opinions on politics: opinions on passing events and opinions on important principles.

Whenever there is a diversity of opinions on a given topic, the topic can be represented as a horizontal line, the opinions on it can be represented as points, and some opinions will be to the left of others.

Political parties and factions, of course, hold multiple opinions. These can be represented as points within a circle. The points that different political tendencies share can be represented within overlapping circles. This is the political center. The points on which they disagree are the political extremes.

As Socrates and Rousseau both argued, we all want what’s best for us. What’s best for a given people as a whole is the “common good” of a society, which from Plato on has been upheld as the standard of political legitimacy. Aristotle argued that different forms of government can promote the common good: one-man rule, elite rule, popular government, or mixtures of the three.

Thus far, we have ignored the distinction between truth and opinion. But what’s really best for us is not necessarily what we think is best for us. However, it is possible to replace opinions with truths through philosophical dialectic, as well as studying history and nature. A similar process can take place in the political realm: in juries, in cabinets, in legislatures, and in public assemblies.

Under ideal conditions, as opinions are replaced with truths, a consensus emerges. This consensus can be represented as the intersection of the different political tendency bubbles. Thus, in a properly constituted—i.e., legitimate—political system, the “suck” of the center is the pursuit of truth about the good so that it can be enacted in just laws and institutions.

This is exactly what our modern liberal democracies pretend to be doing. But behind the facade of democratic legitimacy and deliberative process, we have something very different: government by individuals, factions, and tribes pursuing their particular interests at the expense of others and the common good. In such a system, political principles and platforms are largely shams, which are evoked in debates but ignored in practice.

Thus we must make a distinction between the real political center and the sham political center. The real political center is the common good of a society arrived at through truth-seeking political dialogue and deliberation. The sham political center is more akin to a market price: it is the constantly fluctuating result of essentially selfish agents buying and selling policies, which means buying and selling opportunities to loot the nation.

Yet there is a limit to this market metaphor. The marketplace accommodates all forms of “effective demand,” meaning demand backed by money. But in the contemporary political system, the political preferences of the vast majority have been rendered ineffectual.

As I discuss in my essay “The Uppity White Folks Manifesto,”[1] the largest voting bloc in most white countries can be described as populist, meaning that they want both social conservatism and state intervention to protect the livelihoods and political power of the masses from wealthy and connected elites. Although there are populists of the Left, the populist voting bloc is overwhelmingly nationalist and identitarian.

Since the emergence of the “neoliberal” consensus in the Nineties, the elites want the exact opposite: social liberalism and free markets. They are not nationalists but globalists, not identitarians but cosmopolitans.

Various polls put the populist bloc around 40% of the electorate and the neoliberal bloc at around 10%. Yet neoliberal policies still win out. How is this possible?

Basically, the electorate is never allowed to vote on a straight populist ticket. Instead, the center-Left packages an interventionist state with social liberalism, and the center-Right packages social conservatism with free markets.

Then, whenever the center-Left is in power, it delivers the social liberalism demanded by the oligarchy while allowing economic exploitation and political corruption to grow unchecked. Whenever the center-Right is in power, it delivers the free-market policies demanded by the oligarchy but does nothing to promote conservative values.

When the electorate gets tired of being betrayed by one party, they vote in the other party, which promptly betrays them again by promoting another set of elite rather than popular preferences.

Thus no matter how quickly the ruling parties circulate, elite preferences are always served to the detriment of the majority. This regime that makes an art of never giving the people what they want is called “liberal democracy.” In liberal democracy, the true political center—the unwobbling pivot around which the ruling parties circulate—is defined by elite preferences.

Of course such a farce cannot go on forever without delegitimizing liberal democracy and producing a populist backlash. Unlike “liberal democracy,” populism is actual democracy that aims at giving the majority what they want. Right-wing, identitarian, national populism is on the rise because people are increasingly seeing through the sham of liberal democracy.

But even when national populists obtain power, they do not rule unopposed. Thus Trump, Meloni, and Orbán found it easier to do things that align with elite preferences (open borders, cheap labor) than the preferences of the masses who put them in office (closed borders, deportations, higher wages).

Elite preferences are hegemonic not just because of guns and money but also because elites control the institutions that shape the culture. Elite preferences are not just served by elected officials; they are also deeply embedded in the bureaucracy and the judiciary; beyond that, they are promulgated and enforced by academia, the media, the churches, and the business world.

Thus fixing things requires more than just electing national populists to office. It requires revolutionary change. Basically, we must purge the leading institutions of society of those who would stand in the way of the common good. Moreover, we must dismantle the establishment’s institutions and patronage networks.

But we are not Republicans, who dream of abolishing National Public Radio but are content to allow private enterprises to pump out the same propaganda to far larger audiences. We should not shut down government institutions that shape the culture. Instead, we should take them over and staff them with our own people. Moreover, we cannot be stopped by private property lines. Private institutions must be purged as well.

But where does this end? What is the goal?

In our current system, we have multiparty democracy and vast numbers of public and private institutions that shape the culture. But in every one of them, anti-whiteness and oligarchical preferences reign supreme. They are the outermost boundaries of polite opinion. Thus, to the people who really run things, it doesn’t matter if you “vote the bastards out” or change the channel, because—when it comes to the things that really matter to our rulers—there is no alternative. If you have the power to tailor a political system to your needs, you ensure that, no matter what happens, you can never lose. I call this all-encompassing soft-power matrix “hegemony.”[2]

The goal of White Nationalism is to intellectually and institutionally dismantle the hegemony of anti-white ideas and make pro-white ideas hegemonic instead. Our goal is to make being pro-white the outermost boundary of polite conversation. Anti-whiteness will be as marginalized and scorned as pro-whiteness is today. Pro-whiteness will be the new political center. Pro-whiteness will be the sun, around which every element of society orbits, their source of light and life.

Once pro-whiteness is established as hegemonic, we can have multiparty democracy, broad public participation in political decision-making, and a rich and creative culture. Why do we need such things? Because we wish to better ourselves. Because progress is possible in politics and culture. Thus we need the freedom to pursue it.

But this freedom needs to have boundaries. Freedom and competition aren’t necessarily good things. They are good if they spur us to greatness. They are bad if they are races to the bottom.

I have lodged two charges against today’s liberal democracies: first, they put private interests ahead of the common good; second, they are anti-white. Anti-whiteness is the absurd moral dogma that nothing is worse than racism and ethnocentrism—but only for white people. They are fine for every other group.

How are these two problems related? Clearly, you can’t pursue the common good in a white society if the government, private enterprise, and the mainstream culture are anti-white: discriminating against whites legally and economically and denigrating us in culture and education.

Everything that supports the common good of a white society is, ipso facto, pro-white. The dogma of anti-whiteness can be used to veto everything necessary for white flourishing and even mere survival. Thus when individuals or tribes wish to loot a white nation, they use the dogma of anti-whiteness to attack whatever opposes them. Even such basics as literacy, numeracy, punctuality, and politeness are being attacked as forms of white supremacy.

Thus, in every white country, reorienting politics around the pursuit of the common good requires the abolition of anti-whiteness.

The future is open in two ways: first, we can better ourselves; second, unforeseeable problems can emerge. Thus the common good of a society can change in unforeseeable ways as well.

But we know in advance that our common good will never be “anti-us.” Thus we can rule out anti-whiteness in advance. This means that pro-white ideas and values must be hegemonic. They will fix the outermost boundaries within which political and cultural innovations can take place.

In other words, White Nationalism means that white interests will be the new political center, the point where all diverging tendencies overlap.

How did it ever seem problematic to put white interests at the center of a white society?

The most reliable system for securing the common good is a mixed regime on the Aristotelian model. Property should remain in private hands, but when private interests conflict with the common good, the common good must prevail.

Education and the heights of culture, however, need to be under state control, and the state needs to uphold the highest standards of virtue and taste. The liberal idea that we can privatize morals and tastes did not lead to freedom but to slavery to vice and decadence—and the interests who promote them.

This means that in the realms of culture and economics, you will be able to enjoy a vast array of opinions and options. But the cultural realm will focus on competition to excel and create new, higher standards, not to trash standards in ever more flagrant displays of decadence. Beyond that, none of them will be anti-white. The merry-go-round of politics and culture will turn on the unwobbling pivot of pro-white hegemony. Because the people who matter—the people who can’t lose—will be white people, for a change.

But if everything can change within pro-white parameters—ruling parties, cultural and educational institutions, etc.—how does one keep those outermost boundaries in place? That is the topic of my next essay, on the concept of a “Deep State.”

Notes

[1] In Greg Johnson, White Identity Politics (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2020).

[2] See “Hegemony” in Greg Johnson, New Right vs. Old Right (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013).

The Specter of Populism^*

The populist uprisings of 2016—Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—aren’t epochal events like the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Not yet anyway. But you wouldn’t know that judging from the panic that swept through Western political elites.

Bernard-Henri Lévy denounced Brexit as the “victory of the most rancid form of sovereignty and the most idiotic form of nationalism”; Jacques Attali decried the “dictatorship of populism”; Alain Minc lamented the victory “of ill-educated people over the well-educated”; and Daniel Cohn-Bendit simply exclaimed, “I’m sick of the people!”^[1]

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker warned against “galloping populism”; the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change declared that populists “pose a real threat to democracy itself”; and Pope Francis, who knows something about good and evil, admonished the world that, “Populism is evil and ends badly.”^[2]

It is quite commonplace for journalists and politicians to denigrate populist voters as a “rabble” or a “mob” motivated by “ignorance,” “fear,” and “hatred,” including “racism” and “xenophobia.” They also characterize populist politicians as “demagogues” who “pander” to the worst instincts of the mob—unlike the edifying statesmen of the center-Left and center-Right.

Populism seeks to rescue popular government from corrupt elites. It is no surprise that the elites strike back. What is surprising, though, are their frank expressions of fear and hatred of the people, which can only strengthen populist convictions. Such self-defeating behavior is ultimately encouraging. Elites this arrogant and impulsive have little future.

I wish to defend populism from two elite criticisms.

First, populism is commonly accused of being “anti-democratic.” Yascha Mounk frames populism as “the people vs. democracy.”^[3] I argue that populism is not anti-democratic, but it is anti-liberal.

Second, many critics of populism accuse it of being a form of white identity politics, and many critics of white identity politics accuse it of being populist. I argue that populism and white identity politics are distinct but sometimes overlapping phenomena. Populism and white identity politics do, however, complement one another, so that the strongest form of white identity politics is populist, and the strongest form of populism is identitarian.

First, though, we need to clarify what populism really is.

Political Ideology or Political Style?

One of the more superficial claims about populism is that it is not a political ideology but simply a “political style.” An ideology is a set of principles. A political style is a way of embodying and communicating political principles. The idea that populism is merely a political style is based on the observation that there are populisms of the Left and the Right, so how could it be a unified ideology? Of course, there are also liberalisms of the Left and Right, but this does not imply that liberalism is merely a style of politics rather than a political ideology.

Principles of Populism

What is the ideology of populism? What are its basic principles? Just as Right and Left liberalism appeal to common political principles, Right and Left populists also have the same basic political ideas:

• All populists appeal to the principle of popular sovereignty. Sovereignty means that a people is independent of other peoples. A sovereign nation is master of its own internal affairs. It can pursue its own ends, as opposed to being subordinated to the ends of others, such as a foreign people or a monarch. The sovereignty of the people is the idea that legitimate government is “of the people, by the people, for the people,” meaning that (1) the people must somehow participate in government, i.e., that they govern themselves, and (2) the state acts in the interest of the people as a whole, i.e., for the common good.

• All populists politically mobilize on the premise that popular government has been betrayed by a tiny minority of political insiders, who have arrogated the people’s right to self-government and who govern for their own factional interests, or foreign interests, but not in the interest of the people as a whole. Populists declare that the political system is in crisis.

• All populists hold that the sovereignty of the people must be restored (1) by ensuring greater popular participation in politics and (2) by replacing traitorous elites with loyal servants of the people. Populists thus frame themselves as redeeming popular sovereignty from a crisis.

Two Senses of “the People”

When populists say the people are sovereign, they mean the people as a whole. When populists oppose “the people” to “the elites,” they are contrasting the vast majority, who are political outsiders, to the elites, who are political insiders. The goal of populism, however, is to restore the unity of the sovereign people by eliminating the conflicts of interest between the elites and the people.

Ethnic & Civic Peoplehood

There are two basic ways of defining a people: ethnic and civic. An ethnic group is unified by blood, culture, and history. An ethnic group is an extended family with a common language and history. Ethnic groups always emerge in a particular place but do not necessarily remain there.

A civic conception of peoplehood is a construct that seeks to impose unity on a society composed of different ethnic groups, lacking a common descent, culture, and history. For instance, civic nationalists claim that a person can become British, American, or Danish simply by government fiat, i.e., by being given legal citizenship.

Ethnic nationalism draws strength from unity and homogeneity. Ethnically defined groups grow primarily through reproduction, although they have always recognized that some foreigners can be “naturalized”—i.e., “assimilated” into the body politic—although rarely and with much effort.

Civic nationalism lacks the strength of unity but aims to mitigate that weakness by constructing and imposing a civic ideology. Civic nationalists also hope to offset diversity with strength in numbers, since in principle the whole world can have identity papers issued by a central state.

A civic people is a pure social construct imposed on a set of particular human beings that need not have anything more in common than walking on two legs and having citizenship papers. Civic conceptions of peoplehood thus go hand in hand with the radical nominalist position that only individuals, not collectives, exist in the real world. Groups are mere “social constructs.”

An ethnic people is much more than a social construct. First of all, kinship groups are real biological collectives. Beyond that, although ethnic groups are distinguished from other biologically similar groups by differences of language, culture, and history, there is a distinction between evolved social practices like language and culture and mere legislative fiats and other social constructs.

Ethnic peoples exist even without their own states. There are many stateless peoples in the world. But civic peoples do not exist without a state. Civic polities are constructs of the elites that control states.

Populism & Elitism

Populism is contrasted with elitism. But populists are not against elites as such. Populists oppose elites for two main reasons: when they are not part of the people and when they exploit the people. Populists approve of elites that are organically part of the people and function as servants of the people as a whole.

Populists recognize that people differ in terms of intelligence, virtue, and skills. Populists want to have the best qualified people in important offices. But they want to ensure that elites work for the common good of the polity, not for their own factional interests (or foreign interests). To ensure this, populists wish to empower the people to check the power of elites, as well as to create new elites that are organically connected to the people and who put the common good above their private interests.

Populism & Classical Republicanism

When political scientists and commentators discuss the history of populism, most begin with nineteenth-century agrarian movements like the Narodniki in Russia and the People’s Party in the United States. But nineteenth-century populism looked back to the republics of the ancient world, specifically the “mixed regime” of Rome.

Aristotle’s Politics is the most influential theory of the mixed regime.^[4] Aristotle observed that a society can be ruled by one man, a few men, or many men. But a society can never be ruled by all men, since every society inevitably includes people who are incapable of participating in government due to lack of ability, for instance the very young, the crazy, and the senile.

Aristotle also observed that the one, few, or many could govern for their factional interests or for the common good. When one man governs for the common good, we have monarchy. When he governs for his private interests, we have tyranny. When the few govern for the common good, we have aristocracy. When the few govern for their private interests, we have oligarchy. When the many govern for the common good, we have polity. When the many govern for their factional interests, we have democracy.

It is interesting that for Aristotle, democracy is bad by definition and that he had to invent a new word, “polity,” for the good kind of popular rule that was, presumably, so rare that nobody had yet coined a term for it.

Aristotle recognized that government by one man or few men is always government by the rich, regardless of whether wealth is used to purchase political power or whether political power is used to secure wealth. Thus popular government always empowers those who lack wealth. The extremely poor, however, tend to be alienated, servile, and greedy. But self-employed, middle-class citizens have a stake in the future, long time-horizons, and sufficient leisure to participate in politics. Thus popular government tends to be stable when it empowers the middle class and chaotic when it empowers the poorest elements.

Finally, Aristotle recognized that a regime that mixes together rule by the one, the few, and the many is more likely to achieve the common good, not simply because each group is public-spirited, but also because they are all jealous to protect their private interests from being despoiled by the rest. Aristotle was thus the first theorist of the “mixed regime.” But he was simply observing the functioning of actually existing mixed regimes like Sparta.

One can generate modern populism quite easily from Aristotle’s premises. Aristotle’s idea of the common good is the basis of the idea of popular sovereignty, which means, first and foremost, that legitimate government must look out for the common good of the people.

Beyond that, Aristotle argued that the best way to ensure legitimate government is to empower the many—specifically the middle class—to participate in government. The default position of every society is to be governed by the one or the few. When the elites govern selfishly and oppress the people, the people naturally wish to rectify this by demanding participation in government. They can, of course, use their power simply to satisfy their factional interests, which is why democracy has always been feared. But if popular rule is unjust, it is also unstable. Thus to be stable and salutary, popular rule must aim at the common good of society.

The great theorist of popular sovereignty is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his On the Social Contract, Rousseau claims that the General Will is the fount of sovereignty and legitimacy. What is the General Will? The General Will wills the common good. The common good is not a convention or construct of the General Will but rather an objective fact that must be discovered and then realized through political action.

Rousseau distinguishes the General Will from the Will of All. The General Will is what we ought to will. The Will of All is what we happen to will. The Will of All can be wrong, however. Thus we cannot determine the General Will simply by polling the people.

Rousseau even holds out the possibility that an elite, or a dictator, can know the General Will better than the populace at large.^[5] But no matter how the General Will is determined—and no matter who controls the levers of power—political legitimacy arises from the common good of the people.

Populism & Representation

Populism is often associated with “direct” as opposed to “representative” democracy. Populists tend to favor referendums and plebiscites, in which the electorate as a whole decides on important issues, as opposed to allowing them to be decided by representatives in parliament. In truth, though, there is no such thing as direct democracy in which the whole of the people acts. Even in plebiscites, some people always represent the interests of others. Thus democracy always requires some degree of representation.

One can only vote in the present. But a people is not just its present members. It also consists of its past members and its future members. Our ancestors matter to us. They created a society and passed it on to us. They established standards by which we measure ourselves. And just as our ancestors lived not just for themselves, but for their posterity, people today make decisions that affect future generations. Thus in every democratic decision, the living must represent the interests of the dead and the not yet born.

Moreover, within the present generation, some are too young to participate in politics. Others are unable due to disability. The basic principle for excluding living people from the electorate is that they would lower the quality of political decision-making. However, they are still part of the people and have legitimate interests. Thus the electorate must represent their interests as well.

Beyond that, there are distinctions among competent adults that may lead to further constriction of the electorate, again to raise the quality of political decision-making. For instance, people have argued that the franchise should be restricted to men (because they are the natural guardians of society or because they are more rational than women), or to people with property (because they have more to lose), or to people with children (because they have a greater stake in the future), or to military veterans (because they have proven themselves willing to die, if necessary, for the common good). But again, all of those who are excluded from the franchise are still part of the people, with interests that must be respected. So they must be represented by the electorate.

Thus even in a plebiscite, the people as a whole is represented by only a part, the electorate. Beyond that, unless voting is mandatory, not every member of the electorate will choose to vote. So those who do not vote are represented by those who do.

Thus far, this thought experiment has not even gotten to the question of representative democracy, which takes the process one step further. An elected representative may stand for hundreds of thousands or millions of voters. And those voters in turn stand for eligible non-voters, as well as those who are not eligible to vote, and beyond that, those who are not present to vote because they are dead or not yet born. The not-yet-born is an indefinite number that we hope is infinite, meaning that our people never dies. It seems miraculous that such a multitude could ever be represented by a relative handful of representatives (in the US, 535 Representatives and Senators for more than 300 million living people and untold billions of the dead and yet-to-be born). Bear in mind, also, that practically every modern politician will eagerly claim to be really thinking about the good of the entire human race.

But we have not yet scaled the highest peak, for people quite spontaneously think of the president, prime minister, or monarch—a single individual—as representing the interests of the entire body politic. Even if that is not their constitutional role, there are circumstances—such as emergencies—in which such leaders are expected to intuit the common good and act accordingly.

Thus it is not surprising that cynics wish to claim that the very ideas of a sovereign people, a common good, and the ability to represent them in politics are simply myths and mumbo-jumbo. Wouldn’t it be better to replace such myths with concrete realities, like selfish individuals and value-neutral institutions that let them peacefully pursue their own private goods?

But the sovereign individual and the “invisible hand” are actually more problematic than the sovereign people and its avatars. From direct democracy in small towns to the popular uprisings that brought down communism, we have actual examples of sovereign peoples manifesting themselves and exercising power. We have actual examples of leaders representing a sovereign people, divining the common good, and acting to secure it.

There is no question that sovereign peoples actually exercise power for their common goods. But how it happens seems like magic. This explains why popular sovereignty is always breaking down. Which in turn explains why populist movements keep arising to return power to the people.

Populism & Democracy

Now we can understand why populism is not anti-democratic. Populism is simply another word for democracy, understood as popular sovereignty plus political empowerment of the many. Current elites claim that populism threatens “democracy” because they are advocates of specifically liberal democracy.

Liberal democrats claim to protect the rights of the individual and of minorities from unrestrained majoritarianism. Liberal democrats also defend “pluralism.” Finally, liberal democrats insist that the majority is simply not competent to participate directly in government, thus they must be content to elect representatives from an established political class and political parties. These representatives, moreover, give great latitude to unelected technocrats in the permanent bureaucracy.

Liberal democracy is, in short, anti-majoritarian and elitist. Populists recognize that such regimes can work for the public good, as long as the ruling elites are part of the people and see themselves as its servants. But without the oversight and empowerment of the people, there is nothing to prevent liberal democracy from mutating into the rule of corrupt elites for their private interests and for foreign interests. This is why populism is on the rise: to root out corruption and restore popular sovereignty and the common good.

Populists need not reject liberal protections for individuals and minorities, ethnic or political. They need not reject “pluralism” when it is understood as freedom of opinion and multiparty democracy. Populists don’t even reject elites, political representation, and technocratic competence. Populists can value all of these things. But they value the common good of the people even more, and they recognize that liberal values don’t necessarily serve the common good. When they don’t, they need to be brought into line. Liberals, however, tend to put their ideology above the common good, leading to the corruption of popular government. Ideological liberalism is a disease of democracy. Populism is the cure.

Populism & White Identity Politics

What is the connection between populism and white identity politics? I am both a populist and an advocate of white identity politics. But there are advocates of white identity politics who are anti-populist (for instance, those who are influenced by Traditionalism and monarchism), and there are non-white populists around the world (for instance, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand).

However, even if there is no necessary connection between populism and white identity politics, I wish to argue that the two movements should work together in every white country. White identitarians will be strengthened by populism, and populism will be strengthened by appeals to white identity.

Why should white identitarians align ourselves with populism? Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin argue in National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy that the rise of national populism is motivated by what they call “the Four Ds.” The first is Distrust, namely the breakdown of public trust in government. The second is Destruction, specifically the destruction of identity, the destruction of the ethnic composition of their homelands due to immigration and multiculturalism. The third trend is Deprivation, referring to the collapse of First-World living standards, especially middle-class and working-class living standards, due to globalization. The final trend is Dealignment, meaning the abandonment of the center-Left, center-Right duopolies common in post-Second World War democracies.

The Destruction of identity due to immigration and multiculturalism is a central issue for white identitarians. The Deprivation caused by globalization is also one of our central issues. The only way to fix these problems is to adopt white identitarian policies, namely to put the interests and identity of indigenous whites first. If that principle is enshrined, everything we want follows of course. It is just a matter of time and will.

As for Distrust and Dealignment, these can go for or against us, but we can certainly relate to them, and we can contribute to and shape them as well.

Eatwell and Goodwin argue that the “Four Ds” have deep roots and will be affecting politics for decades to come. National populism is the wave of the future, and we should ride it to political power.

Why do populists need to appeal to white identity? It all comes down to what counts as the people. Is the people at its core an ethnic group, or is it defined in purely civic terms? Populists of the Right appeal explicitly or implicitly to identitarian issues. Populists of the Left prefer to define the people in civic or class terms and focus on economic issues. Since, as Eatwell and Goodwin argue, both identitarian and economic issues are driving the rise of populism, populists of the Right will have a broader appeal because they appeal to both identity and economic issues.

The great task of white identitarians today is to destroy the legitimacy of civic nationalism and push the populism of the Right toward explicit white identitarianism.

Justifying Popular Sovereignty

If populism is based on popular sovereignty, doesn’t a defense of populism require a defense of popular sovereignty? Philosophically speaking, the answer is yes. But in the context of modern political debates, the answer is no, because in democratic debates, nobody gets anywhere by arguing against democracy. So in the political realm, the question is not “Why popular sovereignty?” but rather “Why not popular sovereignty?”

What would you say to a people whose sovereignty you wish to deny? You would have to tell them that they do not have the right to control their own affairs and pursue their own goals. Instead, they must do as you tell them because they must serve your ends, which are more important. Perhaps you wish to rule over them because their territory contains valuable resources that you wish to control. Perhaps you regard the people themselves as resources you wish to control. In short, you are telling them that you wish to make them slaves.

There is a real question if an argument is the appropriate response to such an unvarnished declaration of hostility. When someone declares you to be merely a tool for his own ends, he should not be surprised if you reach for your revolver.

But none of the critics of populism are this brazen, not even Bernard-Henri Lévy. Liberalism triumphed not by rejecting popular sovereignty but by subverting it. This is one reason the elites are so hysterical about the rise of populism. It puts them on the spot. If they affirm popular sovereignty, then populism is the only logical outcome. If they deny popular sovereignty, good luck getting people to vote for that. Thus they’d rather avoid the argument entirely. But we can’t let them. We need to press this advantage by demanding that they live up to the principle of popular sovereignty, which empowers the people they loathe. In a fair contest, illiberal democracy will beat undemocratic liberalism every time.

Counter-Currents, August 27, 2020

^* This lecture was written for the Scandza Forum in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 12, 2019, but it was not delivered because Antifa besieged the venue and prevented me from entering.

^[1] Quoted in Alain de Benoist, “What Is Populism?” in Democracy and Populism: The Telos Essays, ed. Russell A. Berman and Timothy W. Luke (Candor, N.Y.: Telos Press, 2018), p. 335.

^[2] Quoted in Benjamin Moffitt, Populism (London: Polity, 2020), p. 2.

^[3] Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

^[4] See Greg Johnson, “Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics,” From Plato to Postmodernism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).

^[5] See Greg Johnson, “Forced to Be Free: The Case for Paternalism,” Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2016).

Neema Parvini
The Populist Delusion
Perth: Imperium Press, 2022

Neema Parvini’s The Populist Delusion is a critique of populism and democracy from the Right. Parvini devotes eight of his ten chapters to the views of important “elite theorists” (Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, James Burnham, and Samuel Francis) as well as allied thinkers (Carl Schmitt, Bertrand de Jouvenal, and Paul Gottfried). Parvini’s book is brief (145 pages of text plus front and back matter), so his discussions are necessarily brief as well, serving as introductory overviews (or refresher courses) on a number of very important thinkers of the Right. For this, I can recommend Parvini’s book, which is lucidly written and focuses on essential issues.

However, I disagree with Parvini’s overall thesis about the delusional nature of populism:

Parvini uses democracy and populism as interchangeable throughout his book. I have no quarrel with this, since both terms have been used to refer to the idea of popular sovereignty: to use Abraham Lincoln’s words, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Why does Parvini think that the idea of popular sovereignty is a delusion? Simply because he looks around the world and does not observe self-governing peoples (government of the people, by the people). Instead, he sees some people governing other people, specifically minorities governing majorities. Therefore, majority rule or popular government are illusions. But this doesn’t follow.

One could try to counter Parvini’s argument by pointing out instances of popular sovereignty at work: New England town meetings, the popular protests that brought down communism, and populist referendums, plebiscites, and movements that upset elites.

But the deeper problem with his argument is methodological. Popular sovereignty is not the sort of thing one can observe empirically, because it is a norm, an ideal, and empirical realities only imperfectly instantiate ideals.

Specifically, popular sovereignty is a criterion of legitimacy. According to the norm of popular sovereignty, a regime is legitimate if it governs in the interests of the common good of society—the welfare of the people as a whole—as opposed to the interests of whatever particular faction holds the levers of power. Popular sovereignty is not a matter-of-fact observation about who actually exercises power. It is a norm asserting how power ought to be used.

In his Politics, Aristotle upholds the common good of society as the criterion of legitimacy. But he observes that the common good can be secured by different types of regimes. Monarchy is when a single man rules for the common good; tyranny is when he rules for his own interests. Aristocracy is when a minority rules for the common good; oligarchy is when a minority rules for its own interests. Polity is when the majority rule for the common good; democracy is when they rule for their own factional interests. There is no such thing as a society in which everyone participates in politics, because some are always immature or incapable. Aristotle also believed that mixed regimes that combine elements of rule by the one, the few, and the many (such as the United States Constitution) can either pursue the common good or factional interests.^[1]

On this account, simply observing a society in which the many are ruled by the few, or even by a single individual, does not make popular sovereignty a myth or a lie, because it is possible for a minority or an individual to rule in the interests of the whole society, which is what the norm of popular sovereignty demands. Conversely, it is possible for the majority to rule—giving the appearance of popular sovereignty—but they can act against the interests of the whole, which is the true meaning of popular sovereignty.

What is essential to popular government is not government “by the people,” which we seldom observe in the pure form of direct democracy, but rather government “for the people,” which can be achieved by many different regimes.

If this is true, then there is no necessary conflict between elitism and populism, so as long as the elites are merely a means for serving the end of the common good.^[2]

The concept of populism derives from the concept of “the people.” But populists use “the people” in two senses. First, “the people” refers to the whole people, as opposed to other peoples. Second, “the people” refers to the majority as opposed to the small elite of political insiders.

Although populists wish to empower the majority and increase their political participation, they recognize that direct rule by the full people is an impossibility.

First of all, some people are incapable of participating in government because of age or inability. But they are still part of the people. They still have interests. And since they cannot look out for their interests, others will have to look out for them. In short, some form of political representation is unavoidable.^[3]

Furthermore, government by the people still requires officials who will carry out the popular will. Since people are not equal, it is better for everyone if those who execute the public will are better than average in terms of character, knowledge, and skill. In short, the ideal of government “by the people” can never be fully realized.

However, the ideal of government “for the people”—for the common good—is more easily realized. It can be accomplished by monarchical, aristocratic, popular, or mixed regimes. But it is more likely to be accomplished if the rulers are part of the people, rather than foreigners, and if as many of the people as possible are politically empowered, which means an Aristotelian mixed regime in which the one, the few, and the many have power, but the regime as a whole serves the common good. In other words, populists recognize the inevitability of elites, but they have no objection to elites as long as they serve the common good.

Now if you are empirically minded, this is actually an accurate description of the “really existing” populism that has today’s liberal democratic elites in a tizzy. Really existing populists do not demand that the full people exercise direct sovereignty. Such a notion would never occur to them. Instead, they accept that societies are inevitably split into ruling elites and ruled masses. They simply think that their elites are arrogant, corrupt, and govern for factional (and foreign) interests rather than the good of the nation as a whole. Therefore, they support a diverse array of tactics—populist referenda (Brexit), populist parties (Fidesz), populist strongmen (Trump, Orbán)—to bring government in line with the interests of the people. In short, really existing populists recognize that government “for the people” (the ultimate end) is more important than government “by the people” (the means), although they recognize that more involvement by the people can’t hurt.^[4]

If actual populists have no objection to elites as such, but only to corrupt, arrogant, and estranged elites, then simply rehearsing the arguments of various elite theorists does not prove that populism is a delusion. Indeed, many of the thinkers Parvini discusses (Pareto, Michels, Schmitt, De Jouvenal, Francis, Gottfried) openly aligned themselves with populist political movements and figures, from Mussolini and Hitler to Patrick Buchanan and Donald Trump. Others like Mosca and Burnham upheld the idea of the mixed regime, believing that elites govern better if the masses have political power. Thus populists should pay careful attention to Parvini’s analyses of these thinkers, who are actually very useful to populism. But Parvini’s conclusion that populism is a delusion simply does not follow.

Even though Parvini’s central thesis does not follow, his approach to political philosophy is very much in harmony with the elite theorists: Mosca, Pareto, Michels, Burnham, and Francis. All of them are Machiavellians, which is to say political “modernists,” whereas I am a follower of classical political philosophy, primarily Plato and Aristotle.

For instance, all of the elite theorists would sign off on Burnham’s claim that:

This methodological principle explains why Parvini regards popular sovereignty as a putative empirical fact, which can be falsified by empirical study, rather than as a norm or ideal.

The Machiavellians hold that material interests—primarily the struggle for power and wealth—rather than ideas and norms are the driving force of history. As Burnham puts it, “The primary object of every élite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege. . . . The contrary view is that the primary object of the rulers is to serve the community.”^[6] Note that Burnham’s language simply ignores that the “contrary” view is a norm, not a factual statement. Like Parvini, he then refutes the classical view by pointing out that actual statesmen seldom live up to the norm—as if this would surprise Plato or Aristotle.

One of Burnham’s basic principles is that “The laws of political life cannot be discovered by an analysis that take’s men’s words and beliefs, spoken or written, at their face value.”^[7] This is because Burnham regards ideas not as driving forces of history but merely as tools of the struggle for power, which is the real force behind historical events. For instance, Burnham states that ideas like the common good are usually put forward by “spokesmen for an élite” to justify its power.^[8] Another of Burnham’s basic principles is that “The rule of the elite is based on force and fraud.”^[9] Of course, if ideas don’t matter, why would one have to peddle fraudulent ones? One also wonders if Burnham’s ideas are fraudulent tools of elite power. Should we take his ideas at face value, or should we ask what power interests he was serving?

Are ideas or material interests the ultimate driving force of history? A lot of people act as if material interests are their only concern. But that is because they have accepted modernist ideas like “Ideas don’t matter; life is all about pursuing material aims” or “The common good is a fiction; only private interests are real.”

The creators of modern “political science” like Machiavelli knew that not all men are cynical, self-interested materialists, but they wanted them to become that way, because they thought it would make the world a better place: it would remove the principal causes of social conflict and reorient society around the pursuit of material wealth. They were not describing facts. They were creating them by upholding new ideals, new norms of behavior, while pretending that they were just describing the way things always were.

Modern “political science” is first and foremost a form of political legislation that cloaks itself in the language of value-free science. Of course, most advocates of political modernism sincerely believe that what they are saying is true. And increasingly, it is true, because of the steady advancement of the modernist project.

But once we are wise to Machiavelli’s trick, the question again becomes about how men and societies should be. We return, in short, to the questions of classical political philosophy. If, in that spirit, someone wishes to write a book entitled The Populist Ideal, he will find Parvini’s The Populist Delusion to be a useful starting point.

Counter-Currents, May 27, 2022

^[1] For a more detailed exposition of Aristotle, see my essay “Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics,” in From Plato to Postmodernism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).

^[2] See my “Notes on Populism, Elitism, and Democracy” in New Right vs. Old Right.

^[3] For more on the necessity of representation, see my essay “In Defense of Populism,” in White Identity Politics.

^[4] For more on contemporary populism, see my speech “National Populism Is Here to Stay,” in White Identity Politics.

^[5] James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (Borough: Lume Books, 1943), p. 204.

^[6] Burnham, The Machiavellians, p. 205.

^[7] Burnham, The Machiavellians, p. 204.

^[8] Burnham, The Machiavellians, p. 205.

^[9] Burnham, The Machiavellians, p. 205.

If you think this essay is about you, you might be paranoid.

Guardians of the conventional wisdom frequently accuse White Nationalists of being “paranoid” when we express fears of non-white crime, white demographic decline, race replacement immigration, and ultimately white extinction and white genocide.

White Nationalists are also frequently accused of “phobias” like “xenophobia” (the fear of aliens).

These accusations are not psychiatric diagnoses. They are not offered to help us. They are just cheap rhetorical attacks, attempts to dismiss our concerns as irrational. By pathologizing our views, our enemies seek to frighten off conventional-minded people who might otherwise take our ideas seriously. They might even gaslight the weakest among us into doubting their own sanity.

But in truth, White Nationalist fears of non-white crime, multiculturalism, and race-replacement immigration are quite reasonable. Even our most alarming ideas—white extinction and white genocide—are, unfortunately, based on objective facts and sober analysis.^[1]

Jewish historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”^[2] is often name-dropped as a classic treatment of political paranoia, but it is a disappointingly superficial magazine article, published in Harpers in November of 1964 against the backdrop of the Barry Goldwater–Lyndon Johnson presidential race.

Hofstadter does not reflect on the idea of paranoia; he simply uses it in an attempt to pathologize conspiracy theories and gaslight people who are inclined to think in conspiratorial terms. Nor does Hofstadter refute any of the conspiracy theories he mocks, and for good reason: They all have more than a kernel of truth, particularly Senator Joseph McCarthy’s warnings of communist infiltration of the US government.

Frankly, the only good feature of Hofstadter’s essay is its title, which is why it is more often cited than read. I’m going to steal the phrase “the paranoid style” because, although the central claims of White Nationalism cannot be dismissed as paranoid, some people in our movement really do have a paranoid style—if not out-and-out paranoia—so the phenomenon needs to be taken seriously.

What follows are some notes on the paranoid style that will help us to identify it, with the ultimate aim of ridding ourselves of it.

First of all, the paranoid style is bad optics. We are constantly being accused of paranoia and various phobias. There are easy arguments to counter these claims, but the best refutation is a matter of action. We simply should not behave like people in the grip of irrational fears.

Second, the paranoid style is never far removed from actual paranoia, and crazy people don’t belong in a serious movement.

“Paranoia” literally means being out of one’s mind, from the Greek roots “para,” meaning outside or beside, and “noos,” meaning the mind. But paranoia refers to a much more specific form of derangement, namely holding irrational beliefs—but not just any irrational beliefs: irrational beliefs motivated by fear. Paranoids have irrational fears. The things they fear are irrational, and the way they fear them is irrational.

Fear is not necessarily irrational. Bad things happen all the time. By its nature, rational action pursues the good and avoids the bad. Whenever one is about to act, it is entirely reasonable to ask, “What’s the worst that could happen?” among all other possible outcomes.

Paranoids don’t just fear the worst, they believe the worst, and they do so compulsively and irrationally. What makes a fear irrational? It is irrational to fear things that are unreal or unlikely to happen. Paranoids, however, can’t help it. For paranoids, fearing is believing.

In my experience, paranoids are not just delusional. They also want you to share their delusions, for if you share their delusions, the delusions seem more real, and the paranoids feel less alone. Paranoia is a lonely and terrifying place. Paranoid ideation is not pleasant. It is a self-destructive compulsion akin to drug addiction. Paranoids are like moths frantically fluttering around a lightbulb until they die in fits of agony.

But how does one convince people of delusions? To do this, paranoids generally resort to two techniques: demanding that you treat them as authorities, so you simply accept their core delusions on faith, and making up tissues of lies that support belief in the core delusion. This is akin to the “pious fraud” who makes up stories about divine revelations and miracles to support core religious articles of faith.

One wonders if paranoids consciously lie to shore up their delusions or if some of them really believe the stories they improvise on the spot. Surely some of them are conscious liars who take pleasure in duping others because it makes them feel powerful. Naturally, if paranoids are willing simply to lie, they are also willing to use all lesser forms of deceptive rhetoric and emotional manipulation as well, and when those fail, some will move to screaming rage and physical assault.

The worst-case scenario in a debate is that one’s opponent is intellectually dishonest. Thus in debates, paranoids tend to go straight to accusations of bad faith. For paranoids, there are no honest disagreements or honorable opponents. There are simply bad actors and venal shills. Since most of our movement consists of exchanging ideas online, such accusations are generally the first sign that one is dealing with a paranoid.

Of course there really are intellectually dishonest people, but the problem with paranoids is their lack of evidence and their rush to judgment. Paranoids are often lightning-fast because they move from suspicion to certainty without the necessity of gathering and weighing evidence. The best way to counter them is to slow them down and ask for evidence. “Now wait just a minute there, sonny . . .”

Since paranoids come off as cranks, they usually have plenty of opponents, a number that only increases with time. If one has many intellectual opponents, the worst-case scenario is that they are all conspiring together behind the scenes. Thus paranoids routinely describe their opponents as parts of sinister “conspiracies,” “alliances,” “axes,” “cults,” “mafias,” and other networks, imagining all sorts of covert horse-trading, handshakes, and maneuvers to swindle the paranoid out of his just deserts.

Of course such conspiracies can actually exist, but the problem with paranoids is their hasty reasoning and lack of evidence. Paranoids like to paint ballroom-sized canvases with broad brushes at furious speed. So the best way to respond is to focus in on the details and ask if they are based on fact and if they are really connected with one another. “Cool story. But is it true?”

In my experience, paranoia is also often connected with narcissism. I have already discussed one aspect of the paranoid’s narcissism: his desire to convince an audience of his delusions. But narcissism is not just a fruit of paranoia, it is also a root of it, especially narcissistic delusions of grandeur. If one has an inflated self-image, the fact that other people seldom share it requires an explanation. Since a narcissist by his very nature is resistant to revising his self-image, he has to conclude that something is wrong with other people. They would acknowledge his superiority, if only they were not stupid or jealous or malevolent.

Furthermore, since it is inconceivable to a narcissist that many different people would independently draw the same negative conclusions about him, he is again drawn to conspiratorial explanations, positing the existence of whispering campaigns whereby a few malevolent people spread lies around like a cold virus.

Again, envy and coordinated campaigns of slander are real human phenomena, so one can’t dismiss such explanations out of hand. Instead, one has to ask for evidence.

Another trait I have noticed in paranoids is a tendency toward categorical, binary, and all-or-nothing thinking. Categorical statements are absolute and unqualified. In a binary situation, there are only two options. One binary option is all-or-nothing.

Of course, there really are categorical truths. There really are binary situations, including all-or-nothing options. But one needs to offer evidence for them. The paranoid mind is drawn toward such thinking, regardless of evidence, because of an irrational attraction to the extreme and momentous, especially if accompanied by a frisson of fear.

There’s also an element of intellectual laziness to such claims.

A paranoid might wish to argue that something about Trump’s foreign policy is not as it seems, but instead of offering specific evidence, he simply announces a categorical metaphysical statement: “Nothing is what it seems.”

A paranoid might want to argue that a certain event was not a coincidence, but instead of offering specific evidence for his thesis, he simply resorts to the categorial metaphysical statement: “There are no accidents.”

A paranoid might wish to establish that two apparently unconnected events are actually covertly connected, but instead of actually showing the connection, he appeals to a categorical metaphysical statement: “Everything is connected.”

Another feature of the paranoid style is to put the stamp of eternity on things, because a problem that has always existed is worse than a problem that emerges at a specific time under specific conditions. For instance, Donald Trump is not a disappointment because he failed to implement his most important promises—immigration restriction and America First in trade and foreign policy—in the face of stiff opposition. No, Trump is a fraud, because that is the worst-case scenario. But there’s something still worse than being a fraud, hence the accusation that Trump was always a fraud. He never meant to keep those promises.

Yes, some things are forever, but most aren’t, thus here too it comes down to a question of evidence.

There’s also an element of narcissistic preening to claiming that one has always had the inside scoop.

But aren’t paranoids sometimes right? Yes, but that should not give them any credibility. If you believe the worst about everybody, sometimes you will be right, but merely by accident, in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day. But if you happen to glance at a stopped clock at the right time of day, that is no reason to regard the instrument as reliable. In the same way, the paranoid mind is not a reliable guide to the truth, even though sometimes it might stumble on the truth by accident.

Not everyone who exhibits the paranoid style is actually paranoid. But there are enough paranoids in the White Nationalist milieu that others have picked up their tropes by osmosis. This is a problem, because, at core, White Nationalism is an intellectual movement. We are a vast online educational project.

But, unfortunately, we are also a school for unreason because this movement has no barriers to the entry of crazy people, nor any ways to quarantine or expel them. The best we can do is inoculate ourselves against such influences by teaching our people how to spot and avoid them.

This is crucially important, because at present, our movement’s greatest strengths are truth, intellectual rigor, and the credibility they grant us in a culture based on lies and unreason. We need to guard these advantages zealously from both critics without and crazies within.

Counter-Currents, January 13, 2020

^[1] See Greg Johnson, “White Extinction” and “White Genocide,” The White Nationalist Manifesto.

^[2] Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harpers, November 1964.

A fan asked me to discuss Michael Mann’s 1995 movie Heat as part of my ongoing series of essays on mafia movies. I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that Heat is not really a mafia movie. The good news is that Heat is such a magnificent movie that I am reviewing it anyway.

Heat is a crime movie, indeed an organized crime movie. But it is not a mafia movie, although the trailers and posters make it look like one, because it stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, both of whom have had leading roles in major mafia movies. But the criminals in Heat do not belong to Italian, Irish, or Jewish organized crime “families.”

Beyond that, the classics of the mafia genre are set within the world of the mafia. Both the protagonists (the “heroes” or at least anti-heroes) and the antagonists (“the villains”) are all criminals. The police, of course, hover in the background and are also antagonists, sometimes aligned with criminals.

But when the police move into the foreground as the protagonists, we have what can be called a police drama as opposed to a crime drama. Mafia movies involving undercover police agents like The Departed or Donnie Brasco are something of a hybrid of the police and the crime genres.

Conflict gives life to stories. In the hands of a good director, the more conflict, the better. Clashing worlds (cops vs. criminals) and conflicts within these worlds (double crosses, undercover agents, double agents, hoe drama), can be quite intellectually and emotionally involving. Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is a masterpiece of this hybrid genre. But the greatest example is Heat.

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In America today, the ultimate taboo is uttering the so-called “N-word.” But you can get around that with an “N-Word Pass,” although only a genuine N can issue it. Basically, the pass takes the form, “Go ahead, bro. I won’t be offended.”

On the American Right, however, the ultimate taboo is voting for the Democrats. We need to destroy that taboo. Thus, as an American Rightist, I am issuing “D-Vote Passes” for the upcoming midterms. Go ahead. I won’t be offended.

In fact, I would be delighted, for the D-Vote Pass is a new weapon against the Republican establishment, including MAGA Inc.

Politicians are consummate cynics. They think their job is to betray the common good of the nation and the trust of their voters in order to give the wealthy and powerful what they want. Politicians do, however, pay attention to “electability.” They can’t very well screw the voters if they are no longer in office. Thus every politician calculates just how much he can betray his constituency without losing reelection, and they will go right up to that line, because they are ravenous for a share of the loot.

But generally, the worst thing politicians need worry about is a large number of their voters staying home on election day. Every voter who does that costs them one vote. But what if disaffected Republicans decide not simply to throw their own votes away? What if they decide to cancel the votes of other Republicans?

If you voted Republican in the past but abstain, the Republicans are down one vote. Let’s say they go from 50/50 to 50/49. If you vote Democrat, however, the total will be 51/49. Thus the Republicans are now down two votes.

If it feels good to stay home on election day to show your displeasure, then let me tempt you with even greater satisfaction.

Envision the smuggest Boomer Republican: the kind of guy who thinks you are lazy, entitled, and just need to tug harder on your bootstraps; the kind of guy who thinks that Israel is our greatest ally, and “We need to fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here”; the kind of guy whose greatest fear is still the N-word, or worse, the R-word (racist).

Because he thinks that there’s nothing worse than racism (but only for white people), he is delighted when one of the Left’s favored groups—non-whites, women, gays, even trannies—mouths Republican talking points, for he feels that such people give him moral validation. If only we could run such people for office, such Rainbow Republicans would advance the Republican agenda, be immune from criticism, and allow the whole party to bask in a glow of moral unimpeachability.

Even Trump thinks this way. That’s why we got such diverse Republican losers as Herschel Walker in Georgia, Dr. Mohammed Genghis Oz in Pennsylvania, and Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia. That’s why we got trial balloons for Bruce “Caitlin” Jenner running for governor of California. That’s why we have the loathsome scammer Vivek Ramaswamy running for governor of Ohio today.

Imagine the sort of Boomer Republican who laps up that kind of slop and comes back for seconds. Maybe you know one personally. Give him a face. Give him a name.

Now imagine doubling—nay tripling—your pleasure on election day. Instead of just withholding your vote by staying home, go to the polls and picture yourself canceling this Boomer’s vote by voting Democrat. Because that’s in effect what you are doing. If you switch your vote to Democrat, it is as if the biggest Boomer Republican you know never voted at all.

If the idea of a D-Vote Pass goes viral—hint, hint—it will give Republican politicians and political consultants nightmares. And that’s a good thing. They need to fear the voters, and they don’t fear them enough. But if betrayals routinely lead not to abstentions but defections to the other side, that doubles the negative consequences of betrayal. Which means there will be fewer betrayals.

“But Greg, be reasonable. You don’t want these crazy Leftists back in power, do you? You don’t want to cut off your nose to spite your face, right?”

No, I don’t. But the best way to keep crazy Leftists out of power is for the Right to keep promises to their voters. And the best way to guarantee that Republicans keep their promises is to make them live in fear of the voters they routinely betray. And the D-Vote Pass gives them more reason to worry.

It is all well and good to advise me to “be reasonable” and not vote out of spite. Rationality in an imperfect world means choosing the least bad option. Politicians know this, of course. Thus they will only betray their voters up to the point that they become worse than their rivals in the eyes of likely voters. The more rational and discerning the voters, the further politicians will go in betraying their constituents, because they know that even the most minuscule differences will be enough to reelect them.

But expecting voters to be rational is itself irrational. Irrational and spiteful voters exist in vast numbers, and they are harder to manipulate than people like me. But for some reason, the GOP still thinks they can maximize betrayal and pay no price as long as they are a micron less horrible than the Democrats. So what is the GOP counting on?

They might be assuming that most voters who abstain will never cross the line and vote Democrat because they would feel somehow “dirty.” When my old friend Louis Andews argued for voting for Obama in 2008, that was my response: “I’m fine with abstaining. But I would feel dirty to vote for someone like Obama.” The more conservative a person is, the stronger his disgust reflex when contemplating the deformed, the diseased, the insane, the Left.

Louis scoffed at that attitude, and he was right to. I was willing to abstain from voting for John McCain, because I thought it was better for him to lose. But if I preferred he lose, then shouldn’t I do everything in my power to make that happen by actually voting for the other side? In effect, I needed a D-Vote Pass to help get me over my disgust reflex at voting for the Democrats. Indeed, if Louis had simply written “D-Vote Pass” on a piece of paper and handed it to me, it might have made a difference by underscoring the absurdity of my position.

The idea of a D-Vote Pass would be far more frightening to the GOP if we had a bloody scalp to wave in victory. My suggestion is that we focus entirely on Vivek Scammaswamy in Ohio. Vivek encapsulates everything rotten about MAGA, Big Tech, and the GOP. Thus destroying his political career would have tremendous symbolic value. But it wouldn’t have terrible political consequences for the country as a whole. It is a state race, not a national one. Ohio’s legislature will remain Republican. Thus putting a Jewish Democrat in the governor’s mansion surely wouldn’t be worse than an Indian scam artist who would open the gates of the Turd World.

So, to all my readers in Ohio, you have my D-Vote Pass. Consider yourself absolved of all forms of guilt, bad karma, and Democrat contagion. You are also duly deputized to extend this D-Vote Pass to all friends and family. Let’s defeat Vivek and put the fear of white voters into MAGA and the GOP.

Sergio Leone’s final film, Once Upon a Time in America (1984) is often touted as one of the all-time great mafia movies. I beg to differ. I think Leone’s Westerns are masterpieces. But Once Upon a Time in America is a terrible movie: boring, distasteful, and dumb.

However, I let myself be persuaded to rewatch it, on the grounds that there are multiple versions of the film, and surely the film I hated was the massively cut and rearranged American version that Leone had disowned. If only I would watch the 3 hour, 49-minute version shown to thunderous applause in Europe, then I would appreciate that this too is a masterpiece. Well, I watched it, and to be perfectly frank, I sympathize with the American distributors who cut it.

And to think that Sergio Leone actually turned down the chance to direct The Godfather because he wanted to work on this project instead. But maybe Godfather fans should be grateful that Leone didn’t ruin that story as well. Imagine the opening scene of The Godfather broken in the middle by Vito Corleone scraping a spoon around the inside of a coffee cup for two minutes while everyone in the room exchanges nervous glances.

As an Italian, Leone was annoyed that Hollywood (a largely Jewish industry) was making movies about Italian gangsters while—for some reason—ignoring the Jewish ones. To set the record straight, Leone decided to make an Italian movie about the Jewish mafia.

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Nick Bougas, creator of the most famous cartoon since Mickey Mouse, is dead.

Nicholas Arthur Bougas was born on March 16, 1955, in Savannah, Georgia. He died peacefully after a long battle with cancer on August 22, 2026, near Atlanta, Georgia. He was 71.

Nick Bougas is most famous as A. Wyatt Mann, the creator of the Happy Merchant, which is an Anti-Defamation League-certified hate symbol, as well as such famous cartoons as “Hey Rabbi, watcha doin’?” (on Jewish hate crimes hoaxes) and “Around Blacks, Never Relax” (if only Irina Zarutska had taken this message to heart). He even added a new term to the English language: “Bix Nood” (verb: “Bix Nooding”), meaning unintelligible African-American babble—and, by extension, Africans in general.

Nick showed great artistic talent as a young child. He took an early interest in caricatures and political cartoons. In his twenties, he developed a reputation as an illustrator for various “underground” publications.

Nick began drawing political cartoons in the 1980s while living in Los Angeles, to push back against the insufferable sanctimony of white liberals about race relations.

A. Wyatt Mann (A White Man) was born in 1988, when Tom Metzger began publishing Bougas’ cartoons in his WAR (White Aryan Resistance) newsletter. They soon became the most popular feature.

Nick belonged to the same transgressive West-coast, far-Right subculture as Jim Goad, Adam Parfrey, Nicholas Schreck, Boyd Rice, and others. In this scene, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Ragnar Redbeard were the preferred philosophers. Anton LaVey and Charles Manson had guru status. Progressivism and liberal egalitarianism were mercilessly mocked. Biological race and sex differences were affirmed. Elitism and eugenics were defended. Historical revisionism about WWII and interwar fascism was widely embraced.

This subculture was not identical to the White Nationalism, neo-Nazism, and skinhead scene of the time, but as Metzger demonstrated, the border was at least open.

In addition to his work with Metzger, Nick was a contributing editor and artist for The Manson File: The Unexpurgated Charles Manson as Revealed in Letters, Photos, Stories, Songs, Art, Testimony, and Documents, ed. Nicholas Schreck (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1988).

When Jim and Debbie Goad began publishing ANSWER Me! in 1991, Nick contributed illustrations. In fact, I discovered Nick Bougas in the Spring of 2000, the same day I discovered Jim Goad, for Nick contributed an eye-meltingly brutal caricature of Andrea Dworkin to issue 4 of ANSWER Me!

In addition to his art, Nick directed a number of documentaries: Death Scenes (1989), hosted by Anton LaVey; Death Scenes 2 (1992); and Death Scenes 3 (1993). Also in 1993, he directed Speak of the Devil, a biographical portrait of Anton LaVey. In 1994, he released The Goddess Bunny, about a disabled transgender tap-dancer named Sandie Crisp, as well as Serial Killers, based on extensive original research. In 1998, Nick released an album of bloopers and gaffes called Celebrities . . . At Their Worst!

Nick was slow to adopt computers and get online. Once he did in the early 2000s, he was astonished to find his old A. Wyatt Mann cartoons everywhere. Eventually, they became staples of the online Right. The Happy Merchant, in particular, is world-famous and has been endlessly adapted and parodied, or maybe the right word is “homaged.” (Is a parody of a parody an homage?) Nick was delighted and began creating better quality versions of his images to make them more easily shared.

There isn’t even a name for the Bougas-Goad-Parfrey subculture. Until I get a better suggestion, I will call it the Zine Right. The Zine Right was a crucial metapolitical precursor of the online Right, to which it contributed ideas, images, and above all an ethos: transgressive, ironic, and humorous.

A transgressive subculture is important for overthrowing the ruling lies of an age. An ironic subculture allows people to try on heretical ideas before buying them and gives them plausible deniability if they get cold feet.

However, now that realism about biological race and sex differences, anti-liberalism, and the Jewish question are going mainstream, a lot of the merely transgressive trappings are being discarded as marginalizing. Beyond that, irony may be useful for exploring heretical ideas, but political change requires commitment and seriousness.

The humor, however, will never get old. The mainstream Right, as well as more conventional forms of the far Right, tend to be humorless. Why wouldn’t they? They’re losing—or they are mourning various Lost Causes. They feel deluged and defeated by the Left.

You can only laugh at something if you have risen above it. If you can’t laugh at the Left, then spiritually they still rule you. And if they rule you spiritually, how can you defeat them politically?

Nick Bougas, Jim Goad, Adam Parfrey, Charles Krafft, and the whole gang had rejected the moral foundations of modern liberalism, so they could look down on it and laugh. The mainstream Right, by contrast, consists basically of people who accept liberal morality and thus feel ashamed of their lack of enthusiasm for liberal policies and outcomes.

That ethos of lordly, mocking contempt for liberalism traveled from Nick’s cartoons, as well as the work of his friends, onto the internet, where they found a vast and growing audience. They also found welcoming forums, where their ideas and images could propagate, mutate, and change the culture. And the rest is history.

Someone needs to write a history of the Zine Right. Honestly, the book should have been started years ago, because now four important players are dead: Adam Parfrey, Charles Krafft, Jim Goad, and Nick Bougas. I would love to publish such a book, as well as any interviews conducted for such a project. Someone needs to begin today.

I got to know Nick Bougas after I became friends with Jim Goad. Jim had the highest regard for Nick. As soon as Jim came onboard at Counter-Currents, he brought Nick along to do cartoons and graphics under the name Phil Eiger Newmann (Feel Like a New Man).

I first met Nick at a Counter-Currents event in Atlanta in 2022. Like so many notorious “haters,” he was intelligent, warm, friendly, and of course witty and charming. Nick knew he was a celebrity on the internet. But he had never been a celebrity in a room full of people, and he clearly enjoyed himself. He brought a stack of Happy Merchant prints, which he graciously signed and simply gave away.

I suggested that Nick actually sell limited edition prints and other (erm) merchandise. The project went through a long period of “development hell” before producing a web archive, awyattmann.com and a limited-edition signed Happy Merchant print, copies of which are still available. Now that Nick is gone, I will make sure the site is updated with all of his work.

Nick was preceded in death by his father, Arthur Nicholas Bougas, also called Nick, and his mother Joyce Bougas, née Caterina. He is survived by his longtime partner Sandra Weinberg, as well as his legions of characters and cartoons, which will continue to be morphed and memed as long as evil and sanctimony are in need of mocking.

Counter-Currents, August 24, 2026

I can’t think of a pop-cultural hero more out of sync with wokeness than the blond, muscular, sword-wielding prince of Eternia known as He-Man. Thus when I heard that Amazon—of Rings of Power infamy—was making a Masters of the Universe movie, the thought never crossed my mind that it would be good.

Indeed, my first thought was, “How could they make Masters of the Universe any worse?” For I can’t think of a dumber and more cynical pop-culture “franchise.”

Star Wars made such a fortune with toy spinoffs that by the time Return of the Jedi rolled around, the merchandising tale was wagging the movie dog. Hence the Ewoks. Thus it made sense for toy giant Mattel to launch its own sword, sorcery, and spaceship franchise just to move merchandise

The villain of Masters of the Universe is Skeletor, a sort of cross between Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine. But Skeletor’s nemesis is not a callow, whiny farm-boy like Luke Skywalker. Instead, he is modeled on Arnold Schwartzenegger as Conan the Barbarian. Imagine the smirks at the pitch meeting: “. . . and we’ll call him ‘He-Man.’”

I confess that my only exposure to this franchise is the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie produced by Israeli schlockmeisters Golan and Globus, starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and Frank Langella as Skeletor. Everything about this film is cheesy and derivative: Skeletor from Star Wars, He-Man from Conan, costumes and sets from Flash Gordon and Star Wars. Even Skeletor’s costume change at the end is borrowed from Emperor Shaddam’s getup in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune book. The score by Bill Conti is a transparent rip-off of John Williams’ scores for Superman and Close Encounters.

There is very little back story and world-building. I guess they were assuming that their audience were all readers of comic books and watchers of Saturday-morning cartoons.

Dolph Lundgren looks great as He-Man, but he has very few lines, because he can barely speak, much less act. Also, he is often comical when wielding a sword or blaster. The fight sequences are quite clumsy and bumbling.

Frank Langella’s Skeletor shows that a good voice can sell lines on the level of: “Bwa-ha-ha, I am evil. [In case you were confused about his motivations.] Once I have the Sword of Power, I will be master of the universe. Kneel before me, pathetic Earthlings. Seize them, you fools, they’re getting away!” But Max von Sydow did it better as Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon.

The most appealing performance is a stunning young Courtney Cox as a California high-school girl. Yes, most of the action takes place in Southern California in the 1980s, which to today’s eyes looks far more idyllic than Eternia. The two main human characters are earnest blue-eyed high-school students. But they are still quite mature for the intended audience, for this movie is strictly for kids. The whole film has the production quality of a TV movie, maybe an Afterschool Special.

But Masters of the Universe offers the kids very little. It has just enough cool-looking costumes, sets, and shots for trailers and commercials designed to get kids to bug their parents to buy movie tickets. But the film itself isn’t all that entertaining. There isn’t even a moral to the story. Frankly, most ten-year-old boys with He-Man action figures could come up with better stories on their own.

So how could one of the wokest corporations on the planet make Masters of the Universe any worse? The answer is: it couldn’t. There was nowhere to go but up.

Of course you don’t need to make a good reboot to beat the original. But the new Masters of the Universe is actually a very good movie.

Beyond that, this reboot is politically interesting, because at Amazon (of all places), wokeness didn’t parody Masters of the Universe. Indeed, the new Masters of the Universe parodies wokeness.

The movie opens on a positive note. We hear the earnest, manly voice of the young He-Man filling in the back story. He-Man has a strong sense of identity: “Everything I am is because of where I come from.” He comes from Eternia, a world of beauty and magic, where fairy tales and legends are real. He-Man says, “I come from a pretty impressive lineage of mighty heroes. Noble, strong, fearless.” The rulers of Eternia protect it from evil with the Sword of Power. But they don’t just have the Sword of Power, they “use it.” Power is good, you see, because evil is real and must be defeated.

Throughout this monologue, the young He-Man is constantly parrying against cynicism about heroism and magic, which is precisely what a woke movie would have pushed. About 21 minutes into the movie, we learn why He-Man is battling with wokeness: because he’s surrounded by it.

Our young prince was exiled from Eternia as a child and raised as an orphan on Earth, in Oklahoma City to be exact. At the age of 25, he is known as Adam Glenn. Adam works in the Human Relations department of some mega corporation. Adam’s name plate on his desk lists his pronouns (he/him). Adam’s colleagues are precisely the sort of people you would expect in a HR department: a perky, power-mad black woman, a couple of neurotic white girls with pink and blue hair, and a neurotic nu-male named Darryl.

Adam is apparently pretty good at his HR job. His vocabulary is full of corporate team-building, conflict-resolution, and self-esteem speak. And even though Adam is a big, handsome Chad—which he tries his best to hide in a baggy pink shirt—his speech and mannerisms are very much those of an office-trained, long-housed nu-male. But in his spare time, Adam is hunting for the Sword of Power, which he lost in his rather bumpy arrival on Earth.

Naturally, this creates a conflict, actually two conflicts.

First, there is the conflict between Adam’s heroic identity and purpose, on the one hand, and modern “normie” society that values conformity and hedonism, on the other. Adam’s effeminate brown roommate Hussein (played by a Polynesian actor, because any brown person will do) urges Adam to forget about Eternia and learn to fit in, do his job, and live for the weekends (which means to live for self-indulgence). But for Adam, that means to “forget who I am and my entire life’s purpose.”

Second, there is a deeper conflict between Adam as a masculine white male and a society that denigrates all these traits. Naturally, when the big blond lug is seen hunting online for swords during his work hours, the neurotics around the HR office begin to get nervous. In the end, when it comes down to a choice between the Sword of Power and his corporate job, Adam chooses the Sword, which after some comic misadventures, brings him back to Eternia where he must confront the evil Skeletor.

At this point, Adam must learn to use the Sword of Power. But Adam, like a lot of over-nannied and under-fathered young men today, has some self-confidence issues. Shades of Unbreakable, Adam is virtually indestructible. But he doesn’t know it, because he’s never tested himself. This, of course, is very much a metaphor for all of today’s overcoddled young white men.

Beyond that, America today is very much a liberal society, animated by the faith that all conflicts can be resolved through talk. Adam has taken this to heart, and when he returns to an Eternia at war, it generates some genuine comedy.

But Adam grows into both his manliness and his role as prince, becoming increasingly willing to fight and kill his enemies. At a certain juncture, when his friends think Adam is about to give the Sword to Skeletor, that’s the furthest thing from his mind. Adam won’t give up the Sword of Power. Instead, he needs it to kill Skeletor.

When Adam is mocked for not knowing how to use the Sword, he retorts that he knows how but simply prefers not to. You see, Adam isn’t just a dangerous, muscular brute. He’s also wise. He knows how to make right use of the sword. He prefers peace. He prefers conflict resolution. He prefers covenants. But in the end, he knows that covenants are meaningless without the Sword of Power to enforce them. Beyond that, some people cannot be bargained with, because they are simply evil.

Liberals hold that human nature is malleable and thus “perfectible.” Mankind is not evil by nature but by nurture. Thus we can hope to cure evil through therapy and social engineering. Adam has tried to see the good in his enemies. He has tried to talk things out. But finally he has been rebuffed: “There is no good in me that you might uncover. There is nothing you can say that will change my nature. For I am a villain.” If some people are evil by nature, they must simply be conquered, which is why a Sword of Power comes in handy. Thus at this point, Adam declares “The time for talk is over.”

When Adam was a little boy, he made up his own names for the various heroes of Eternia. When the battle is over, Adam is asked if he made up a name for himself. “You’re gonna laugh,” he says to all the cynics and wokesters out there. Then he answers: “He-Man,” meaning “a strong man . . . a masculine fellow.” There’s a bit of scoffing. “What? It’s too macho?” To which his friends answer, “No, no. That’s very manly, and you are very manly.” And that’s it. No more apologies. No more irony. No more cringing.

There’s no time for any of that. A distress signal has come in. “This looks like a job for He-Man.”

Masters of the Universe is for manliness and power. It is against liberalism, wokeness, feminism, and weakness. Moreover, although this movie has many genuinely comic scenes, it does not poke fun at good things. It saves mockery for the evil and stupid; it attacks cynicism and irony directed at the good. These are very healthy messages.

Beyond that, Masters of the Universe is highly entertaining. The fight scenes and special effects are brilliant. The thrills are genuinely thrilling, and the comedy is genuinely hilarious.

Only two things annoyed me about this movie. First, there is a bit of tasteless sexual innuendo. Second, one of the major characters, the royal master of arms, Duncan, was race-swapped by Idris Elba. But it could have been worse. It feels like one of those eighties movies where the black sidekicks act white.

Aside from those caveats, everything else about this reboot is not just better than the original but good in an absolute sense. Anglo-Greek actor Nicholas Galitzine is excellent as Adam/He-Man. Jared Leto voices Skeletor like Tim Curry’s Evil in Legend, with the occasional lapse into Rocky Horror’s Frank N. Furter. Sasheer Zamata is hilarious as Adam’s girlboss. There really are no weak links in the cast, unless you count Dolph Lundgren, the big oaf, who has a cameo.

I also loved the music of Daniel Pemberton: imagine a fusion of Queen’s score for Flash Gordon and Howard Shore’s music for The Lord of the Rings. It works.

I was slightly annoyed when the director undermined Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” with a bit of irony in the middle. But he redeemed himself by matching the subsequent fight sequence to the words of the song, even the cringe-inducing line, “Bring on the girls.”

Masters of the Universe went through long spells in development Hell and Purgatory before hitting the screen, so it is hard to pinpoint who is responsible for making this such a good film.

My bet is on the director, Travis Knight, a white former rapper and the son of the co-founder of Nike. Knight runs a stop-motion animation studio. In addition to Masters of the Universe, he has directed two stop-motion animated movies, Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) and the forthcoming Wildwood (2026), as well as a live-action Transformers film, Bumblebee (2018).

We shall watch his career with great interest.

Now you need to watch this movie. I was surprised to learn that Masters of the Universe lost money at the box office. People are weary of superhero movies. Beyond that, critics were sensible enough not to denounce it as subversive Right-wing propaganda, so I simply assumed it would be more woke trash. But I predict the Masters of the Universe will become a cult classic. So make my prediction come true by watching it. It is now free to stream on Amazon Prime.

“Grifter” is one of the most abused words on the Right. A “grifter” is a confidence trickster or con artist: a criminal who steals by gaining then betraying the trust of his victims. Thus calling someone a grifter is accusing him of being a liar and a thief.

Unfortunately, the word “grifter” is used by some to stigmatize anyone in the movement who brings in money by any means: subscriptions, merchandise, donations, etc.

Since money is the lifeblood of any professional political movement, stigmatizing all money-making as theft would reduce the movement to a handful of amateurs. This would doom our movement to failure and our race to extinction.

Thus anyone who denigrates all money-making as grifting is doing the enemy’s work. They should be called out for this behavior, and if they persist, they are either stupid or evil and should be shunned either way.

Unfortunately, the grifter charge has staying power, because there are a lot of people on the online Right who act suspiciously like grifters.

How does one distinguish between a grifter and a legitimate online commentator? It has everything to do with sincerity: a grifter is a confidence trickster, meaning that he pretends to agree with you on important things so you will give him money.

By contrast, a legitimate take-seller sincerely believes what he says. If money changes hands, it is to support the cause both parties believe in.

How do you tell if someone is sincere or not? Some grifters make it easy to spot them by acting slimy and insincere. There are actually people on the Right—a lot of people—who want to be in abusive parasocial relationships with snake-oil salesmen. Thus it actually pays for grifters to be blatantly insincere. But if a grifter is really good at simulating sincerity, you’ll never know.

Still, there are some signs. Grifters are all about money, so they follow the money. A grifter pretends to believe what you believe so you will give him money. When the rewards of one belief begin to dip, he will abandon it for other, more profitable beliefs.

Everyone in politics follows the news cycle. It is natural to change one’s takes on changing events and people. It is also natural to drop topics when they are no longer relevant. It is also natural and healthy to refine one’s beliefs over time. So these are not signs of a grifter.

But one should be suspicious if someone flip-flops on fundamental principles and issues: pro-Jewish one day, anti-Jewish another; racial nationalist one day, civic nationalist another; etc. Sincere and principled people don’t make fundamental changes in a glib and casual way.

One should be especially suspicious if people move from radical ideas to mainstream ones. The mainstream is where the money is, but it lacks truth and goodness. While it is conceivable that apostates have found a deeper truth and a higher good closer to the political center, the more likely explanation is grifting.

Deep down, some people are not motivated by objective truth and the common good. Instead, they are motivated by attention and money. On a long enough timeline, and with sufficient incentives, such people will do anything for money and attention, and since the public is fickle, grifters must be fickle too.

There is another theory about apostates. Ex-White Nationalists like Richard Hanania, Patrick Casey, and Scott Greer are widely scorned as ideological turncoats or simple grifters eager to get on the good side of various Right-wing Jewish gate-keepermen. But what if they are still basically on our side? What if they are merely pretending to be apostates to better mainstream our ideas? If this is true, they may be delusional, but they are still somewhat admirable.

But if this really were true, then wouldn’t they want us to help sell their cover by scorning them as apostates anyway? If so, then I take some pleasure in thinking that Richard Hanania wants me to reduce him to a grease spot on the floor. So even if Hanania types are secret agents, nothing about our behavior toward them should change.

Grifters love to talk about religion, because if you adopt someone’s religion—or pretend to—that gives you instant credibility in the eyes of the community of believers, and grifters are all about finding markets and exploiting trust. Thus two of the biggest sociopaths who sully the Right, the Tate brothers, have advertised that Andrew Tate is a Muslim convert (probably because Muslims help one another get away with rape and pimping) and Tristan Tate is a “devout” Romanian Orthodox Christian (probably because he was living in Romania before being arrested for rape and pimping).

Grifters stick together: they exchange clout, publicity, and recognition, and they try to steal one another’s paypigs. So if you suspect someone of being a grifter, see if he hangs out with known grifters. It isn’t hard, since they are eager to advertise such connections.

Another way to spot grifters is to look at how they spend their money. Sincere activists plow their money back into the movement. Grifters are in it for themselves, so they spend money on themselves. The more they make, the more they spend. They are often easy to spot, because most of them are narcissists, so they make their consumption conspicuous.

Now some might be tempted to ask, “What’s wrong with grifters?”

In other words, “What’s wrong with people who steal through deceiving others about the most important issues in the world, like religion or the survival of the white race?”

I’m going to leave religion out of this and focus simply on politics.

First, we are in a battle of ideas. We can’t win if we don’t play. And we can’t play if we don’t take ideas seriously. Thus we can have no tolerance for people who pollute the battle of ideas with unserious attitudes about truth, principally ironic game-playing[1] and outright grifting. You may be delighted when a grifter with a large audience promotes your memes. But it gains you nothing if he flip-flops to the opposite side in pursuit of a new market.

Second, our goal is to preserve and restore high-trust white societies. To do that, we need to build a high-trust movement. Thus we can have zero tolerance for people who erode social trust. Morally speaking, a man who threatens you with a knife to steal your money is far cleaner than a man who cons you out of it with a hard luck tale. The robber steals only money. The con artist also undermines the trust that is the foundation of society. That’s why I would hang every conman, even a bum who cons you out of five dollars. Imagine the punishments deserved by people who would con our race out of its future.

Third, grifters are attention seekers, and when there’s little in the news cycle for them to react to, they will turn their focus inward and stir up some movement drama, which is highly profitable. We don’t need people who make that part of their business plan.

Fourth, grifters suck money out of the movement that could be used for advancing our cause.

At this point, we should note that the first three problems with grifters are shared by another, much larger category of people: online attention whores and drama queens who don’t sell merchandise or collect donations. They simply do it for the love of the game.

Thus money is not the root of this evil. The root is selfishness, insincerity, and unseriousness. Grifters are just the tiny minority of attention whores who manage to monetize their vices.

What can be done about grifters, attention whores, drama queens, and the like?

Very little. Directly attacking such people often makes them stronger. Thus the best thing is to sensitize the broader movement to the problem, teach them to spot such people, and encourage them to shun these parasites as moral lepers.

But if we can’t really rid ourselves of grifters, can we at least make use of them? After all, some of them have large audiences.

I don’t think it is worth the risk. First, grifters are bad for the movement. Thus anything that strengthens grifters harms our cause. Second, associating with grifters harms serious people. The audience you think you might gain is far less important than the moral and intellectual credibility that you will lose.

Note

[1] See Greg Johnson, “Postmodernism vs. Identity,” in From Plato to Postmodernism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).

In “Against the ‘Marketplace of Ideas,’” I argued that White Nationalists cannot model our work on a business that caters to the given ideas and preferences of the public, because currently, the public mind is very much in the hands of our enemies. Thus instead of following the public, we must lead them; instead of pandering to them, we must better them.

But there are strong economic and social incentives to abandon hard White Nationalist truths for flattering mainstream illusions: you’ll make more money; you’ll be more popular; you’ll be more socially acceptable. How do we combat this?

First, we simply need to make people aware that there is a conflict at all. Freedom isn’t just having options; it is being aware of one’s options. We can’t really be responsible until we know that we are making choices and what we are choosing. If one does not grasp the distinction between pandering to the public and leading it, but one regards popularity and profit as measures of success, it is easy to become a panderer without even knowing it.

Second, we need to recruit people of good character who, when shown that they have the choice to lead or pander, will make the right choice—who will prefer truth, justice, and the common good over more personal and proximate rewards like money and popularity.

Third, the distinction between a business and a profession is useful here. Businesses measure success by profits. Professions measure success by promoting the public good. Our goal is the latter. We aim at nothing less than the survival and flourishing of our race.

Fourth, if our movement is more akin to a profession than a business, what sort of institutions should we build? Lawyers and doctors are professionals, but their firms are businesses—often very big ones. Still, we recognize that the profit motive corrupts the pursuit of the common good, thus we have restraints on corruption, namely professional codes of ethics as well as economic regulations. As bad as law and medicine are today, they would be far worse if they dispensed with the trappings of a profession and focused entirely on making money.

The best way to protect a profession from the corruption of market incentives is simply to make it a non-profit institution. But even non-profits need to bring in more money than they spend. Thus non-profits also face the temptation to corrupt rather than better the public, simply to pay their bills. This is especially the case with non-profits that need to fund themselves from day-to-day donations, which creates the very same incentives as in businesses existing on day-to-day sales. But this is not true of non-profits that are funded from the interest generated by large financial endowments.

Thus I think that the best models for our metapolitical institutions are churches or universities that have large financial endowments. Such institutions are about upholding and propagating a body of knowledge. And because they have large endowments, they don’t have to chase money, which removes the corrupting incentive to change their messages to match the public mood.

The purpose of a church is to preserve and uphold revealed truths and share them with the world, regardless of their popularity at any given time. Obviously, this would be difficult if, to survive, churches had to win weekly popularity contests with competing churches and religions, as well as secular belief systems and weekend sports.

Americans don’t like the idea of an “established” church, meaning a church that enjoys official status and government subsidies. But such a church does not need to compete with other churches to fill its coffers. Thus it would be less likely to set foot on the slippery slope that leads to modern American “megachurches” sponsoring rock concerts and preaching the gospel of prosperity.

Religion is essentially different from market transactions. A business does not tell potential customers: “You are ignorant; your desires are corrupt; you are guilty. You need to become better.” Instead, a business seeks to satisfy the given preferences of potential customers. The best salesman flatters his customers. He doesn’t threaten them with damnation.

If you have money in your pocket, a shirt on your back, and shoes on your feet, you are good enough for most businesses. You don’t need to improve your knowledge, character, and tastes to become a good customer. In fact, those would just get in the way.

But what if people really do need moral and spiritual improvement? The first step is always to tell them, even if it hurts their self-esteem. Imagine, though, if a church’s survival depended on competing with churches that preach that human beings are naturally good, thus you are fine just the way you are. Obviously, more people will buy the latter message in the “marketplace of ideas,” even if it reinforces their vices—including the vice of complacency—leaving them worse off.

Like churches, educational institutions are primarily about preserving and passing on a body of knowledge as well as improving the character and tastes of students. Like religion, education is premised on the assumption that the student is not good enough the way he is. He is ignorant. He is vulgar. He has bad habits. Otherwise, he wouldn’t need to learn anything.

Thus, like religion, education is fundamentally different from the market. Education is about improving a student’s knowledge, character, and preferences, not catering to his existing level of ignorance, vice, and vulgarity. Thus to do their edifying work, educators need to be insulated from market incentives.

Perhaps the single most subversive institution in modern higher education is allowing students to evaluate teachers. If a teacher’s pay and promotion are affected by student evaluations, this creates an incentive to flatter students, lower standards, and inflate grades, because one gets better evaluations with easy courses rather than hard ones. In effect, student evaluations empower students to resist the essential educational relationship by replacing edification with catering, pandering, and flattery, thus corrupting both higher education and themselves.

How can our movement maintain the purity of our message and goals in the face of the constant pressure to compromise in the pursuit of economic and political popularity? We need to create non-profit educational organizations with large financial endowments that insulate our thought-leaders and opinion-makers from economic incentives to compromise on essential matters of principle. Of course, even though we cannot compromise on the content of our message, we should also encourage innovation and pragmatism in the means by which we persuade more and more of our people to our side.

From a White Nationalist point of view, the main problem of modern churches and higher education is not that they preach unpopular ideas but that they preach the wrong unpopular ideas because these institutions have been captured by the Left. Thus once White Nationalists finally have our equivalents of the Ford Foundation, we must take special care not to succumb to institutional subversion and capture. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to have institutions worth stealing?

Years ago, a friend told me a parable about a species of hominid that did not live to inherit the earth. These hominids regarded each and every entity as entirely unique. When a tiger leaped out of the darkness and dragged one of them to his doom, this did not prompt any generalizations about tigers as a group. Thus when a new tiger began to prowl the shadows at the verge of the firelight, he was not judged on the basis of the other tiger’s behavior. Indeed, if the first tiger came back, they would not have judged him on the basis of his past behavior either, because that was then, and this is now: two unique, individual moments in time.

But even though tigers are not always man-eaters, and man-eaters are not always hungry, these poor creatures still went extinct, because their problems were not limited to tigers. They could not learn from any experiences at all. They were just too dumb to survive.

Survival, you see, requires the ability to learn from past experiences so that one can predict and even control future ones. To do this, however, one must recognize that there are not just individual beings, but kinds or types of beings. Individuals belong to the same kind if they share a common nature. And, since what we can do follows from our nature, we can infer that if a tiger is dangerous once, it will probably be dangerous again. And if one tiger is dangerous, it is probable that other tigers are dangerous too. Thus if one of us is killed by a tiger, we can take reasonable precautions to make sure that it does not happen again.

Drawing conclusions about kinds based on individuals is called inductive generalization. Induction allows you to infer that all members of a kind are “like that” based on one’s experience of individual members. These purple berries made me sick today, so they will probably make me sick tomorrow, since their nature and mine will probably not change overnight. And since you have the same nature as me, they might make you sick too. And since the purple berries on this bush are the same as the ones on the first bush, they’ll probably make us sick too. The flesh of this animal tastes good to me, so it will probably taste good to you too, since we have the same nature. And other members of its kind will probably taste good to us as well, since they have the same nature too.

However, induction also teaches that natural traits tend to graph along bell curves, with a large number of typical cases in the middle, and small numbers of atypical cases on each end. Typical purple berries will make us sick, but on every bush, there might be some that have no negative effect and others that are downright toxic. Thus, inductive generalizations hold “not always, but for the most part.” In terms of any given trait, “Not all X are like that.” But most of them are.

Inductive reasoning is, therefore, probabilistic. There is always the possibility that one is not dealing with a typical instance of a kind. But it is not likely, since the atypical is by definition rare. Furthermore, as we experience more particulars, it becomes less likely that we are dealing with outliers, and our generalizations about a type become increasingly fixed. We even come to have a sense of what outliers are typical.

Although this is not common parlance, one could refer to a well-established inductive generalization as a “stereotype,” which comes from the Greek stereos, meaning “fixed” or “firm,” and the Greek typos, or “type.”

Inductive generalization does not just allow us to learn from past experience, which would be of merely theoretical interest. Induction also has important practical implications, for it allows us to predict future experiences based on past ones, thus allowing us to act advantageously, even intervene in the course of events and control natural phenomena.

Another word for predicting future experiences is pre-judging them. Another word for a pre-judgment is a prejudice. Now, some prejudices may be utterly baseless and irrational—e.g., prejudices rooted in bad inductive generalizations, superstition, or mental illness—and acting on them may lead to disaster. But well-founded inductive generalizations (stereotypes) are the basis of well-founded prejudices that can be highly advantageous—for instance, helping us to discriminate between dangerous breeds and gentle ones, poisonous mushrooms and edible ones, etc.

Induction, by giving us the ability to predict future events, is the foundation of practical reason, which is the primary human means of survival. Induction is also the basis of science and technology, which allow us to more deeply understand nature and thus to predict and control her better. Induction is thus the foundation of the ongoing conquest of nature that we call modernization and progress.

Stereotypes and well-founded prejudices may be triumphs of inductive reasoning and the foundations of common sense, science, technology, and progress. But today, when it comes to judging human beings, we are told that stereotypes and prejudices are evil and that each individual should be judged on his own behavior, not on the basis of the past behaviors of his kind. We are told that it is an injustice to judge individuals based on group membership.

This viewpoint is a kind of perversion of individualism. I myself defend a kind of Aristotelian individualism. I hold that the purpose of life is the actualization of our individual potentialities for excellence. In terms of politics, a well-ordered society should encourage individual self-actualization and excellence, as long as it does not undermine the common good of society.

The perverse individualism I reject, however, has nothing to do with individual self-actualization. Indeed, it basically amounts to a moral imperative to be stupid, since it is an attack on inductive generalization as such, which is the foundation of practical reason, science, technology, and the modern world. Perverse individualism demands that we behave like the hypothetical hominids discussed above, which were simply too stupid to survive.

False individualism is really an applied form of nominalism, which is the theory that there are no natural kinds in the world, only individuals, and all concepts of kinds are merely social conventions or “constructs.”^[1] According to false individualism, justice requires that we ignore all groups—except, somehow, “humanity”—and judge each individual as an individual, without any preconceptions based on his membership in any merely constructed category, such as race. Nominalism, however, is metaphysically false. There are real natural kinds. Individual members of those kinds share natural traits that allow us to make probabilistic predictions about them based on what we know of their kind.

An individualist could, however, reply that even though nominalism is metaphysically false and there are natural kinds, we should still set aside our well-founded stereotypes and prejudices and judge each and every human being as an individual. In effect, we have to treat every individual as a potential outlier, even though most of them are not. Why? Because, apparently, every individual is of infinite value, so rendering justice is an absolute value and committing injustice is an absolute evil. We must act as if nominalism is true, because otherwise there is a vanishingly small possibility that we might be unjust to a stranger.

This position is a moralistic absurdity, for it simply cannot be practiced. There are seven billion people on this planet. It is impossible to treat each and every one as a special snowflake, and if one tried it, even with the limited numbers of people we encounter in our individual lives, it would consume all one’s time and make it impossible to pursue one’s own goals, i.e., to actually live. Because the purpose of life is self-actualization, and the time we have is short, we just cannot get to know everyone we deal with.

One of the ways that civilization advances is by giving us means of dealing with greater numbers of people than we can ever know as individuals. The market economy, for instance, allows individuals to interact with millions of others around the globe through a largely anonymous symbolic medium that, at least in theory, allows all participants to pursue their individual self-actualization.

Psychologists have observed that the human mind cannot deal with more than 150 or so direct personal relationships, which means that if we could deal only with people as individuals, civilization would regress to the complexity of a hunter-gatherer band or agricultural village.

Well-founded stereotypes and prejudices make possible highly complex societies by allowing us to size up individuals at a glance and to choose to embrace or avoid them. Since natural kinds are limited in number, we actually create artificial kinds with visible distinctions—accents, clothing styles, even uniforms—that allow us to chart a course through complex social situations at a glance. For instance, a black man dressed in a ghetto clown costume signals danger, whereas a black man dressed in a police uniform signals trustworthiness.

Furthermore, if stereotyping is wrong, why do people go to great lengths to stereotype themselves? We all want to find like-minded people, and dressing in a certain way is one means to communicate the group we belong to, e.g., hipster, preppy, metal, redneck, businessman, career woman, slut, prole, gay clone, black thug, etc. Blacks go to great trouble and expense to dress like thugs, in order to communicate that they are dangerous, or that they aspire to be. Why do white liberals think it is disrespectful to take their signaling seriously?

The idea that we should always treat others only as individuals also undermines one of the greatest gifts of modernity: privacy. It is fashionable to bemoan the impersonal and mediated nature of modern society, but in a smaller scale, more personal society, everybody knows everybody else’s business. Thus it can be liberating to live in a society in which most people only know you by the persona you project and the money that you spend. Years ago, a student of mine told me that she grew up in a small Georgia town full of prying, censorious Baptists. She said she could hardly wait to move to Atlanta. I’ll never forget her reason why: “So I could sin.”

Under what conditions do we want to be judged as special snowflakes? We all want a fair shake when we are applying for a job or are on trial for our lives. But even then, chances are we are trying to conceal as much as we reveal. Moreover, we know that employers often can only look at the most superficial criteria simply because they lack the time to dig deeper. But we hope that we can at least expect justice from the criminal justice system. Beyond that, when nothing really crucial is at stake, we are content to navigate with prejudices and stereotypes, i.e., to play the odds with others and accept that others do the same with us.

Since nobody can judge each and every person as an individual all the time, it stands to reason that people only trot out this imperative to use as a weapon against others. Universalists of both the Left and Right typically deploy it against any form of racism, nationalism, tribalism, or antipathy to various religious groups or categories of sexual deviants. Of course, if you prod these universalists just a little, you find that they have some rather poorly formed and emotionally charged stereotypes and prejudices about their opponents.

“Not all Xs are like that,” the universalists say, implying that it is a mortal sin not to appreciate the uniqueness of every special snowflake. And since group membership can never be a basis for excluding someone from our society, there can be no racially and ethnically homogeneous societies, and we cannot uphold any norms of social and sexual behavior. Thus perverse individualism is just a tool to make us incapable of resisting ethnic dispossession and social decadence. What kind of people preach (but do not practice) “blindness” to race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual identity as a moral imperative? Obviously, people who are up to no good.

If you propose discrimination against pedophiles, you will be told that they aren’t all child molesters, and you can’t do anything against them until after they have been caught. If you propose discrimination against blacks or mestizos because of their propensity to criminality, you are told that they are not all like that, and we can’t do anything against them until they actually commit crimes. If you propose discrimination against Muslims on the grounds that their religion mandates lies, rape, terrorism, murder, enslavement, and the overthrow of all governments, you will be told that not all Muslims are like that, and we can’t do anything against them until after they have committed a crime. If you propose discrimination against Jews because they are a hostile elite working to corrupt our politics and culture and destroy our race by promoting white guilt, miscegenation, and race-replacement immigration, you will be told that they aren’t all like that, and it would be collectivism to treat them simply as an enemy group. We have to treat all members of problem groups as if they are innocent, until proven otherwise. It is immoral to try to separate ourselves entirely from problem groups. Instead, we need to give them a chance, which boils down to a chance to harm us. And that means no borders and no standards.

These perverse individualists might even try to argue that the soldiers of an invading army are not all out to kill us, so it would be unjust to kill them just because they carry arms against us. But at that point, we would see what they really are and stand them against a wall. Of course, by then it might be too late.

I am a nationalist because I believe that racial, ethnic, and religious diversity within the same political system are not strengths but weaknesses. They are constant sources of simmering tension that frequently boil over into hatred and violence. Thus the best guarantee of peace and harmony is to create separate homelands for all peoples. A healthy society also requires norms regarding sexuality, marriage, and child-rearing. Thus a society has to practice discrimination. We have to discriminate between who is us and who is not. And within our group, we have to discriminate between the normal and abnormal, the optimal and suboptimal, the law-abiding and the criminal.

We can freely acknowledge that there are some good blacks, Muslims, and Jews. There just aren’t enough of them for our tastes. But even if these groups were equal or superior to us—and they are bound to be superior in some ways—in the end they are simply not us, and we wish to create societies for ourselves and our posterity. We are not creating a team for a sporting event or a spelling bee by recruiting exceptional outliers from a wide range of different groups. We seek to create homogeneous communities with full ranges of both average specimens and outliers, i.e., organic white communities, which are one in blood and culture but diverse in abilities, opinions, and interests, so that all of our people have places to call home.

Counter-Currents, December 16, 2015

^[1] Greg Johnson, “Why Race Is Not a Social Construct,” Toward a New Nationalism, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2023).

In my talk “Freedom of Speech,” I offer a strong argument that freedom of speech—even for our enemies—is necessary for a healthy society.

On the Right, it is common to speak of freedom of speech as an unregulated “marketplace of ideas.” To some extent, this is true. Ideas can be bought and sold like fish and firewood. Moreover, we want the freedom to sell our ideas, and we want the public to be free to buy them.

But the “marketplace of ideas” leaves out something crucial. Thus it is a bad model for understanding what we are doing. Indeed, accepting this model actually subverts our goals.

To understand why, we must make some distinctions.

At any given time, the public has a set of ideas and preferences. These are simply “given.” There are two basic ways to deal with “given” ideas and preferences: catering to them or improving upon them.

Catering to given ideas and preferences means giving the people what they want—or at least what they think they want. There’s nothing wrong with that, if their ideas and preferences are good enough just the way they are.

But obviously, White Nationalists don’t think that. We think our people have been programmed for self-destruction. Thus they need better ideas and preferences. Our job is to provide them.

There are other ways to draw the distinction between catering to and improving upon given ideas.

In terms of personal relationships, one can distinguish between flattery and friendship. A flatterer tells people what they want to hear, even if it is bad for them. A friend tells people what they need to hear if they are to get better.

In cultural and educational terms, one can distinguish between corruption and edification. To edify someone is to build him up: to replace bad habits with good ones, false ideas with true ones, crude tastes with refined ones. There are two forms of corruption. The most obvious form is to make people worse: to corrupt their characters, tastes, and ideas. The less obvious form of corruption is simply to make people comfortable with and complacent about their current state of imperfection.

In political terms, one can distinguish between pandering and leadership. Panderers give the people what they think they want, i.e., they conform to the people’s given ideas and preferences. Panderers may be in perfect agreement with the people, or if they are not, they hide this fact in order to gain power. Leaders, however, seek to improve the people’s ideas and preferences, not merely cater to existing ones.

Leadership in this sense is completely consistent with populism. Populism means upholding the common good of the people as the standard of political legitimacy. That’s what the people really want. However, there is often a distinction between the real common good and what people erroneously think is the common good. Panderers cater to such errors, whereas true leaders try to educate the people to understand their true interests.

Talk of the marketplace of ideas encourages us to think of our movement as a business. But that’s a fundamental mistake. Businesses measure their success in terms of profits. The most profitable businesses, however, cater best to the given ideas and preferences of the public. There’s less demand for those who challenge the reigning ideas of the age, so there’s less profit in it.

Thus our movement cannot think in terms of pleasing the public. After all, many of our people seem pleased to be on the path to extinction. Instead, we need to think in terms of improving the public, which many of them will find most displeasing. Our goal is to save our people, even if we have to drag them kicking and screaming into the future.

In sum: Because our people do not widely support White Nationalism (yet), we must improve the public’s ideas and preferences, not cater to them. We must edify our people, not corrupt them. We must lead them, not pander to them. To do this, we must be willing to tell them unflattering truths, not soothing lies. On every point, this is the opposite of what’s rational in the marketplace.

At this point, we need to introduce another distinction between the form and the content of our message.

The content of our message is simple: white people, everywhere on the planet, are on the path to extinction due to mass migration and below-replacement fertility. To save our race, we need a new political system: sovereign homelands for all white peoples. We need governments that put the preservation and advancement of our peoples ahead of competing economic and ideological concerns.

We can’t change any aspect of the content of this message, because there’s no middle ground—no compromise—between survival and extinction. If whites are not pursuing survival, other forces in this world will drag us to extinction.

Currently, this isn’t a popular message. But promoting some other message won’t help us. So our only option is to make White Nationalism more popular.

This brings us to the form of our message. There are infinite ways to promote our ideas. But some are better than others. Since there are many white audiences, populist, elitist, and boutique forms of outreach are all legitimate. Ideally, there should be as many forms of White Nationalism as there are groups of white people. But the core message for every audience must remain unchanged.

However, even though we cannot change our ultimate principles and goals to chase popularity, the form of our message definitely can and should. Metrics like profit and online “engagement” are useful for testing different forms of outreach.

There is a Latin maxim that captures the approach we should take: “suaviter in modo, fortiter in re”—which means flexible in form, inflexible in content. It is necessary to make this distinction, for otherwise, people will be tempted to change the content of our message in pursuit of popularity and profit, instead of trying out new ways of promoting the truth.

I will end with another important distinction: between a business and a profession. Businesses measure success by profits. Professions measure success by promoting the public good. Professions include medicine, law, education, and the clergy. True statesmanship, of course, should be added to this list.

We should think of our movement not as a business but as a profession, serving the common good of the race and, ultimately, of the whole world.

But how do we build institutions that protect this lofty mission from the corrupting incentives of the “marketplace of ideas”? That is the topic of my next essay.

As an advocate of “highbrow” White Nationalism, I have been asked to weigh in on a social media influence operation deploring “low-IQ” forms of prejudice, specifically “low-IQ anti-Semitism.” Unsurprisingly, this op has been spread by Zionist influencers like Bronze Age Pervert, Will Chamberlin, Captive Dreamer, Ian Miles Cheong, and Patrick Casey.

If one deplores “low-IQ” anti-Semitism, doesn’t that imply that there is a better, “high-IQ” version of anti-Semitism out there? That’s the natural reaction of people who are interested in ideas, i.e., genuinely high-IQ individuals. Oddly, though, these influencers never call for or provide models of “high-IQ” anti-Semitism (for example, the work of Professor Kevin MacDonald).

There’s a simple explanation for this. People like Captive Dreamer are objecting to anti-Semitism as such, not just the low-IQ version. Calling anti-Semitism “low-IQ” is not an attempt to promote a high-IQ alternative. It is simply an attempt to stigmatize all anti-Semitism as dumb.

Who is the audience for this influence op? Not genuine high-IQ people, who have the intellectual curiosity to wonder about the “high-IQ” version of anti-Semitism. Instead, the intended audience is middle-IQ people who are less concerned with having true beliefs than with parroting high-status ones.

There really are low-IQ forms of anti-Semitism.

For instance, the whole realm of “Israel killed Charlie Kirk” conspiracy theories is shockingly stupid. I am pleased, of course, that there’s a strong demand for such theories. Vast numbers of people believe that Zionists are evil enough to kill Charlie Kirk. As a general rule, if someone is capable of genocide, they are capable of any lesser form of infamy. But just because Jews are capable of killing Kirk and benefitted from it doesn’t imply that they actually did it, especially when there is overwhelming evidence that Tyler Robinson is the killer and had very different motives.

Low-IQ forms of prejudice really are a problem, because they crowd out the more intelligent versions. Naturally, our enemies are eager to promote awareness of low-IQ prejudices to stigmatize prejudice as such. In fact, that’s what our Zionist enemies on the Right are doing with the “Low-IQ anti-Semitism” meme.

In fact, in the very act of deploring “low-IQ” prejudice, they are actually creating such prejudices. They are stigmatizing the entire category of prejudices by displaying only the worst examples.

In my essay, “In Defense of Prejudice,” I argue that the “prejudices” deplored by the cultural and political mainstream are far from low-IQ stupidity. Indeed, they are precisely how intelligent, rational beings learn from experience and act accordingly.

Prejudice just means “pre-judgment,” with the “pre” specifically meaning “before experience.” If one touches a flame and is burnt, one is hesitant to touch the next flame. One has pre-judged it as harmful. If the purple berries on a bush make you sick, you are hesitant to eat the purple berries from the same kind of bush in the future. You have pre-judged them as harmful.

Philosophers and scientists call this sort of reasoning “inductive generalization,” which means drawing conclusions about entire groups of things based on specific examples. In simple layman’s terms, “inductive generalization” means learning from experience, then applying one’s knowledge to new experiences.

Thus a world without “prejudices” is a world in which we learn nothing from experience. Imagine encountering every new flame, every new tiger, every new pitbull, every new snake, every new puddle of smelly green water “without prejudice.” We would be incapable of learning from past mistakes and misfortunes. We would be incapable of feeling fear in the face of new dangers. Thus we would make the same mistakes, and suffer the same misfortunes, over and over again. In short, we would be far less capable of survival.

What is the difference between “high-IQ” and “low-IQ” prejudices?

One difference is that high-IQ prejudices are actually based on experience, whereas some low-IQ prejudices are not. For instance, the idea that this particular pitbull is dangerous is a prejudice based on experience, whereas the idea that this black cat will bring bad luck, because such cats are in league with the devil, is a baseless superstition.

Another way of distinguishing between high- and low-IQ prejudices is that intelligent people understand that inductive generalizations are merely probabilistic, meaning that there is some chance of error. After all, our experience of any particular entity is limited. Thus future experience is not likely to confirm all of our expectations.

For example, in the case of the purple berries, one concludes that something about the nature of the berries made one sick, so one should avoid berries of the same kind in the future. However, it is possible that the berries themselves are not at fault. For instance, perhaps the one particular bush you ate from had been contaminated by germs, and the germs not the berries made you sick. Or perhaps the berries were simply not ripe.

From a theoretical perspective, these objections are well-founded. But what if you are not a scientist? Are you under any moral obligation to entertain alternative hypotheses about purple berries? Only if you were starving, and purple berries were the sole available food, would you have reason to rethink your prejudices.

Beyond that, the issue of IQ doesn’t really come into this, because smart people can make honest mistakes and have no reason to revisit them.

Another way in which prejudices can be low-IQ is failing to differentiate between normal cases and outliers. Within every natural kind, traits are distributed on bell curves. For instance, this means that some pitbulls really are cute, harmless little fuzzballs. Thus to make inductive generalizations properly, one needs to preface them with the words, “not always, but for the most part . . .”

Again, from a purely theoretical point of view, this is correct. But from a practical point of view—especially when one is talking about avoiding dangers—it is foolish to bet that any particular tiger or pitbull or black or Muslim is an outlier.

The truly high-IQ position is to look at prejudices from a practical point of view. Practically speaking, low-IQ prejudices are better than high-IQ prejudices for two reasons.

First, low-IQ people need low-IQ prejudices to keep them safe. Children and low-IQ adults cannot be trusted to make intelligent exceptions to rules, so they will be safer if you teach them to follow some rules categorically, i.e., never get in an elevator alone with a strange man, never associate with non-whites, don’t hang out with drunkards and druggies, etc.

Second, there is a sense in which low-IQ prejudices are actually smarter than the “high-IQ” versions. Countless people have been murdered, robbed, and raped because we have dismantled racial prejudices based on the “high-IQ” objection, “Yes, but not all Xs are like that,” which is known as the NAXALT fallacy.

For instance, if Donald Trump had believed that all Jews were liars who are loyal only to their own people, he would not have destroyed his presidency by starting the Iran War based on lies cooked up by the Israelis. Indeed, Trump would have been better off even if he had accepted stupid, crazy, and superstitious beliefs about Jewish evil.

Trump, of course, had extensive negative interactions with Jews. But he was just clever enough to think “Yes, but not all Jews . . .” Yet he wasn’t clever enough to realize that only fools bet on outliers rather than averages. Thus basing one’s actions on NAXALT is not a sign of “high-IQ” but of consummate midwittery.

Jim Goad, America’s greatest satirical journalist since H. L. Mencken, is dead.

James Thaddeus Goad was born on June 12, 1961, in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. He died on June 22, 2026, in Albuquerque, New Mexico of long-term health problems. He had just turned 65.

Jim was the youngest of three sons of a working-class Catholic couple. Jim was highly intelligent, with talents not just in writing but also in acting and music. Before he settled on writing, he wanted to be an actor. After high school, Jim moved to New York City to pursue acting. He was accepted to study acting at New York University under Stella Adler. In the end, he opted to study journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia. He graduated with a B.A. in journalism in 1985.

After graduating, Jim relocated to Los Angeles with his then-girlfriend, Debbie Rosalie, to be a journalist. He worked at the Los Angeles Reader. He and Debbie married in 1987. In 1991, he published the first issue of his pioneering “zine” ANSWER Me! Three more issues followed, in 1992, 1993, and 1994.

In 1994, on the strength of ANSWER Me!, Jim signed a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster, with an advance of $100,000. He and Debbie moved to Portland, Oregon, where Jim wrote his first book, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, & White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

ANSWER Me! and The Redneck Manifesto were my introductions to Jim’s work in 2000.

ANSWER Me! is basically a compendium of irreverent interviews with people like LSD booster Timothy Leary, pimp Iceberg Slim, Satanist Anton LaVey, murderer Richard Ramirez, racist David Duke, and racist Al Sharpton—as well as essays on unpleasant topics like suicide, serial killers, pedophilia, and rape, all of them illustrated with unsettling photographs, collages, and cartoons.

Needless to say, it was enormously controversial. ANSWER Me! was banned for obscenity and blamed for a White House shooting and four suicides, including Kurt Cobain’s. But the controversy simply increased interest. The last two issues had printings of 13,000, and over the years, ANSWER Me! has been reprinted again and again, in increasingly deluxe editions, as a testament to its status as a transgressive pop-cultural landmark.

Beyond Jim Goad himself, ANSWER Me! was my first encounter with the brilliant cartoons of Nick Bougas (A. Wyatt Mann) as well as such characters as Adam Parfrey, Boyd Rice, and Shaun Partridge.

Along with Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture volumes, ANSWER Me! was my introduction to a pre-internet counter-culture that had emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in zines and alternative publishing houses: transgressive, misanthropic, politically incorrect, inegalitarian, racist, sexist, and far-Right coded.

Today, ANSWER Me! seems like a forerunner of image boards like 4chan and 8chan, as well as the wilder shores of the online Right. At the time, such spaces were necessary to incubate heretical ideas. But today, as inegalitarian ideas are becoming mainstream, a lot of it seems like needless, self-marginalizing baggage.

The Redneck Manifesto is a book on anti-white racism, focusing on how rich and liberal whites have made poor whites into scapegoats for “racism,” which is the catchall explanation for persistent black failure. One of the most subversive features of the book is its discussion of white slavery in the United States.

The Redneck Manifesto doesn’t offer any political solutions to America’s race problem. But it is a call to reject white guilt, and that alone has revolutionary implications. Despite the author’s studied cynicism and constant wise-cracking, The Redneck Manifesto ripples with moral fervor. Goad is scathing in his critique of liberalism and compassionate in his defense of white scapegoats.

When it was first published, Goad’s Manifesto was just as politically incorrect as ANSWER Me! Because white identity politics has grown so much in the last three decades, the Manifesto seems almost tame today. But there will never be a society in which ANSWER Me! will seem tame, and that’s probably a good thing.

I bought my copy of The Redneck Manifesto on July 6, 2000. I breezed through it and liked it so much that I wanted to contact Jim Goad. But when I looked into it, I discovered that he had been sentenced in 1998 to two-and-a-half years in prison in Oregon for beating up his girlfriend, a stripper named Anne “Skye” Ryan.

Jim started dating Skye in 1997 while still married to Debbie. By all accounts, Jim and Debbie were not a good match. She had an IQ in the 80s—which is odd, considering that she was Jewish and her father was an M.D.—and she was highly neurotic. In November of 1997, Debbie took out a restraining order against Jim, claiming that he had physically abused her and threatened to kill her. They divorced in December. However, after Jim was arrested for beating Skye in May of 1998, Debbie withdrew the restraining order, saying that he had changed. She died of ovarian cancer in 2000.

Obviously, there was a dark side to Jim. He described his upbringing as hellish. His father was brutal. His mother was neglectful. He attended a Catholic school run by nuns, whom he described as sadistic. Subjected to bullying at home and school, Jim learned to give as good as he got.

Jim had a sadistic streak of his own. ANSWER Me! is clearly intended to make people uncomfortable. Jim’s humor was also mean. But he never picked on the innocent, and he found such behavior repugnant. Still, he went out of his way to find guilty parties to unload on. There was clearly a lot of anger there.

Jim shared quite a lot about his difficult and failed relationships with women. In some of his relationships, he seemed to be punishing himself. He told me that when he met his third wife, Norma, he didn’t feel that he deserved such a good woman who simply wanted to make him happy. But he decided to stop punishing himself and enjoy his life. I last spoke to Jim a week before he died. “How’s the Missus?” “Just an angel,” he replied.

Jim’s second book, Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2002), was an autobiographical work written while in prison. I hated it. I was angry that such a talented writer, who obviously saw through the reigning lies of our time, was wasting his talent wallowing in self-pity and self-justification.

I wrote a scathing review entitled “Redneck Rousseau: Jim Goad’s Shit Magnet” under the pen name J. P. Nash and sent it to Vanguard News Network. This sums it up: “Shit Magnet is the most repulsive exercise in self-pity and self-justification by a narcissistic, borderline personality since Rousseau’s Confessions, and from a literary standpoint it is almost as brilliant.” I thought Jim was a strange combination of nihilist and narcissist, and the inner freedom of the nihilist was being wasted due to a narcissistic need for public approval.

When I got to know Jim, I realized this was wrong: he was not a nihilist. Yes, he was dismissive of talk about morals because he recognized that most people simply used it for preening or personal gain. But there was a strong moralistic streak in Jim, a strong sense of justice, and a tendency to rake himself over the coals. What I thought was “narcissistic” phoniness was a simple desire for justice.

Jim hated the review and put me on his enemies list. I stopped paying attention to him entirely. I didn’t miss out on much. Just books like Trucker Fags in Denial, with illustrations by Jim Blanchard (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004) and Jim Goad’s Gigantic Book of Sex (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2007).

Sometime in the mid-oughts, Jim moved to the Atlanta area, married his second wife Shannon, and fathered his son, Zane (born in 2008), who sadly is profoundly autistic.

I started following Jim again when he began writing regularly for Taki’s Magazine in April of 2009. I loved his columns. They were a return to the form of The Redneck Manifesto: hilarious and scathing chronicles of liberal, feminist, and rainbow sanctimony as well as anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight hate.

His best work from this period can be found in The New Church Ladies: The Extremely Uptight World of “Social Justice” (Stone Mountain, Georgia: Obnoxious Books, 2017), Whiteness: The Original Sin (Obnoxious Books, 2018), The Bomb Inside My Brain (Obnoxious Books, 2019) (see my review here), and Gender Psychosis: Insanity and Sexual Identity (Obnoxious Books, 2020).

I reprinted a few of his Takimag pieces at Counter-Currents. Jim, however, held a grudge for the Shit Magnet review and banned me from commenting at Takimag.

In November of 2019, Jim made a snarky comment on Twitter about my expulsion from Norway. I responded with flattery (sincere flattery) to turn away wrath. Jim sent me a private message: “Magnanimous reply, Greg.” We started chatting, set aside our differences, and, to my great surprise, we became friends.

Jim felt my review of Shit Magnet was unjust and I accepted his very level-headed and lawyerly argument. He did, however, tell me that he thought it was well-written, which meant a lot coming from Jim Goad.

Jim was unsatisfied with Taki’s Magazine. I crunched the numbers, talked to a couple of donors, and made him an offer. He came on board at Counter-Currents in October of 2020 and wrote two columns a week until January of 2025—more than 400 pieces in total.

I gave him a lot of freedom, edited him lightly, and paid him promptly. In return, he gave us some of his best work, meticulously edited and delivered like clockwork. No excuses, no diva tantrums, just pure professionalism. He was a joy to work with.

The first time we met in person was in 2022 on a sweltering day in Atlanta. The OK Cafe was mobbed, so we ended up having lunch in a Jewish deli. There was a twinge of anxiety before we met. After all, Jim had written quite a lot about how . . . difficult he could be. But as soon as we met, I felt at ease. There was zero drama the whole time I knew and worked with Jim.

As a side note: Jim had many online detractors. They loved to play “gotcha” with him, brandishing embarrassing revelations to the world, as if they were unearthing long-hidden secrets for the first time. Every one of these revelations came from Jim himself, in one of his books. They weren’t lying about Jim, but these pompous frauds were definitely lying about themselves by pretending that they were being more honest than Jim himself. .

When Jim joined Counter-Currents, he wanted to be clear that he wasn’t joining a “cause” or “movement.” Not long before, he had backed out of speaking at an American Renaissance conference because he felt their description of his work implied that he was part of a “movement.” Jim was very much the cat who walked alone.

I had no problem with this, because I think that White Nationalism is actually stronger when people who are not “in” our movement stick up for our concerns and our right to a hearing. Jim was satisfied with this answer.

I told him that his scruples about this struck me as “autistic.” It was a throw-away comment, but Jim took it straightforwardly. That too struck me as autistic. Jim and I both thought that the term was overused. But he also believed that he was “on the spectrum.” Jim was afraid that if he joined a “cause,” it would completely consume his life, as Catholicism did when he was in his teens.

Jim and Norma moved to New Mexico in the fall of 2024. He had grown to hate Georgia and wanted a new beginning. But the move proved extremely stressful. Some people move like dogs, who find it an adventure. Others move like cats, who find it sheer terror. Jim was in the cat category.

Jim had health issues. Back in 2008, he had surgery for a brain tumor. Then there were two bouts of prostate cancer. He also had cardiac problems. The move came on the heels of the second round of cancer treatments. Cancer and moving are among the most stressful things in anyone’s life. Having them back-to-back must have been crushing. But Jim soldiered through it. After the move, however, he sounded highly anxious and extremely depressed.

Although he had tried every drug on the street during his misspent youth, the Jim I knew abstained completely from drink and any drugs that could affect his mental state. Thus he was resistant to suggestions to get prescribed benzos for anxiety and SSRIs for his depression. He had what I call, “That ‘can’t do’ attitude,” which I just chalked up to depression talking.

Jim stopped writing in January of 2025. I offered to pay him for reprints of his best work from previous platforms. But after a while he stopped sending them. When I asked why, he told me that there was no more good material. That’s when I knew he was depressed.

I had entertained the idea of Jim putting together some collections of his Counter-Currents essays, but there was no hope of that until he snapped out of what was ailing him.

I missed him. His fans missed him. People constantly asked about him. But we talked less and less. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he would dutifully report on his situation, and I felt that this just deepened his depression.

The last time Jim and I spoke was on June 14, after I broke the news that one of his dearest friends was terminally ill. I asked him if he could write an obituary. He couldn’t. He could barely write emails. There was news of his health, though: his cancer had returned.

Jim Goad is one of the most interesting and talented people I have ever known. As with Jonathan Bowden, Leo Yankevich, and Charles Krafft, we must now say goodbye. We will remember his life and work. But we should also remember his death, so that we make the most of the time that remains to us.

I will announce any plans for a memorial service. In the meantime, I wish to invite Jim’s other friends and colleagues to share their recollections at Counter-Currents.

It would be a help to Norma if Jim’s webmaster would get in touch as well.

Jim was preceded in death by his father, Alton Howard Goad; his mother Margaret Mary Goad; his oldest brother, Alton Howard Goad, Jr.—known as Bucky—who was brutally murdered in France in 1969 when Jim was eight; and his first wife Debbie.

Jim is survived by his brother, John Francis Goad, who is 13 years Jim’s senior; his second wife, Shannon; his son, Zane; his third wife, Norma; legions of friends and fans; and of course his body of work, which will only grow in influence and regard as white Americans continue to get uppity.

https://counter-currents.com/2026/07/ode-to-jim-goad/

Recently, a fan told me that he was looking forward to my review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I hate to disappoint my fans, but my answer is that I am not reviewing it. I cannot review Nolan’s Odyssey, because I will not see it.

I won’t watch The Odyssey because it doesn’t meet two basic criteria for seeing a movie. First, I see a movie if it seems like an interesting story. But I already know the story of The Odyssey. So there will be no surprises there. Second, if I already know the story of a movie, I might still watch it if I like the director and/or some of the actors and wish to see how they handle it. But none of Nolan’s cast particularly interests me, and I already know enough about how he is directing The Odyssey to conclude that it won’t be enjoyable or interesting. It will just be a disgusting desecration.

Dominique Venner referred to Homer as “The European Bible” (see my translation: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). This is fitting, as the Iliad and Odyssey were foundational books for the ancient Greeks and those influenced by them, which eventually became all of Europe and by extension the world.

But the Bible is an imperfect analogy, since the Greeks regarded Homer as somewhere between historical truth and pure fiction, as evidenced by their willingness to change the stories in retelling them, usually for edifying purposes.

Thus I have no objection to artists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides using Homer as “source material.” Nor do I object to Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato subjecting Homer’s depictions of gods and heroes to moral critique. Nor do I object to later philosophers offering allegorical readings of passages from Homer.

There’s something exalted about Homer. But it isn’t “holy writ.” Thus fulminating about taking “artistic license” with Homer isn’t particularly Homeric or Greek. It actually seems quite Jewish, Christian, or Islamic. In truth, it is grotesque when avowed “pagans” talk about Homer like Jews and Christians talk about the Bible.

Thus if a new Aeschylus or Sophocles were to take liberties putting The Odyssey on the big screen, I would be eager to see it.

Bringing The Odyssey to the screen does not just “license” changes. It demands them. It takes anywhere from 10 to 13 hours to read The Odyssey aloud from beginning to end, depending on the translation, of course. To dramatize the whole story on screen, it would take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours. Many things that are narrated would have to be shown, so most of Homer’s words would be turned into people, places, and things, plus deeds. Obviously, not everything could be dramatized in a 2-hour movie. Cuts would have to be made. The story, of course, would not be cut. But some episodes could not be included.

Then there is the issue of translation, for at least some words of Homer’s dialogue and narration should be included in any screen adaptation.

But there are limits beyond which an adaptation becomes a parody, a desecration, and an insult to the audience. Nolan has crossed that line.

A decade ago, I would have welcomed Christopher Nolan’s vision of The Odyssey. Indeed, when I saw his 2017 movie Dunkirk, I thought Nolan would be a perfect director for The Odyssey, for both stories are about homecoming by means of a dangerous sea voyage in times of war. And Nolan’s homecoming in Dunkirk was emotionally overwhelming. Thus I thought he could do justice to Homer. I’ll let Dunkirk be his Odyssey and skip this one.

Nolan is highly talented. For years, I thought he was our best living director after David Lynch and Martin Scorsese. But Nolan’s decline set in with Tenet, an incoherent movie featuring a talentless Affirmative Action Hero. Oppenheimer was flawed, but a hopeful uptick. The Odyssey now confirms that Nolan has gone “Hollywood,” which is to say, he has gone “woke.”

This means that Nolan isn’t really in charge of his Odyssey. Instead, he’s been possessed by the woke Zeitgeist, which is as evil a spirit as has ever stalked this world.

Wokeness is simply anti-whiteness. It seeks to destroy whites by indicting everything great about white civilization as evil or sick. It seeks to de-center whites from white stories and white societies, replacing whites with non-whites, white men with women, and normal people with homosexuals and transsexuals.

The most common woke trope is blackwashing: depicting white characters with black actors. There are various lame excuses made for such moves: providing blacks with “role models,” puffing up their self-esteem, making stories more accessible to them, etc. But when a historical character like Finland’s leader Marshal Mannerheim is depicted by a black actor, all those excuses fall away. Such casting is not directed toward blacks at all. It is simply directed against whites. It is an act of hate. It is spitting in our faces.

The same is true with The Odyssey, which is a story about white people in Ancient Greece and Troy. The Odyssey should be cast with white actors who looked as much as possible like the characters described by Homer.

Nolan, however, has cast a black actress named Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy was supposedly the most beautiful woman of her time, the “face that launched a thousand ships,” a woman over whom a long and bloody war was fought. Lupita Nyong’o, however, is ugly. If she were Helen of Detroit, nobody would fight a rap battle over her, much less a gang war. Casting her is just an insult to white people, specifically to white women and white standards of female beauty.

Nolan also casts mixed-race goblin girl Zendaya as gray-eyed Athena. This too is simply an insult. Zendaya can’t act. She’s not beautiful. She’s just Hollywood’s go-to girl for displacing white actresses.

Nolan also includes a black named Travis Scott who is apparently a “rapper” as a bard named Demodocus, as if oogaing about bitchez and money is in any way comparable to Homer. This too is an insult, but I can actually get behind it, because it is so stupid that it will be sheer torture for liberals to keep a straight face.

At this point, one might be wondering why the “diversity” in this film is so monochrome. Why no Papuans and Polynesians? Why no Chinese or Indians? If you dig further, it turns out that there is a Lee and a Patel among the extras, plus a few more blacks. Thus blacks remain massively over-represented. Thus The Odyssey is quite America-centric. Only in America have blacks protested and pouted their way to such symbolic centrality.

This is elegant proof that diversity casting is not about making films more “representative” and “inclusive,” else there’d be a Hottentot in every cast. It is simply an exercise in insulting whites by displacing us with the non-whites that are the most offensive to white people and most plentiful in Hollywood. That would be blacks.

There is, however, one more flagrant bit of diversity casting: a female to male transsexual named Ellen now Eliot Page was cast as Sinon, a character that doesn’t actually appear in The Odyssey. Just count your blessings that “Eliot” isn’t playing Achilles. Of course, there’s actually a role for an androgyne in The Odyssey: Tiresias the seer. But Eliot wouldn’t fit the part, because she cut off her dugs.

Why a transsexual? Even mushy Christian conservatives love putting black people in their dramas these days. By including this particular form of insanity, Nolan signals that he is fully on board with the woke crusade against white civilization. It is another gob of spit in our faces.

I am simply not going to piss away a bit of money and three hours of my life to be insulted this way, and neither should you, dear reader. Don’t even hate-watch this film. Just boycott it.

There are better things you can do with your time. Why not actually read The Odyssey? That’s my plan. In the time it would take for you to watch this movie, plus watch all the ads and previews, plus commute to and from it, you can read from a quarter to a third of Homer’s original. I recommend the Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles translations. But I am planning to try out A. T. Murray’s revised Loeb Classical Library translation.

Once whites finally come home, scour our lands of interlopers and collaborators, and reprise control of our destinies, we can commission a film adaptation that does justice to The Odyssey. In the meantime, stick with Homer.

That’s what Odysseus would do.